The Defeat of Judge Roy Moore

The Alabama Special Election cycle has been the source of much drama in the American media over the last month.  The vacancy left in the U.S. Senate by the appointment of Senator Jeff Sessions to Attorney General needed to be filled, and the people of Alabama had three people to pick from: Democrat Doug Jones, and Republicans Luther Strange and Judge Roy Moore.

When Judge Moore won the primary election, this was seen as a victory for strong conservatives, who feared that Strange would act much as the Establishment Republicans do – which is apparently in their own interests, rather than the interests of the people as manifested in the policy decisions proposed and promised by President Trump.

There has long been controversy surrounding Judge Moore, for his very strong Christian stance about directing the probate judges to continue the Alabama state ban on same-sex marriages (after the US Supreme Court ruled such bans as unconstituional) in 2016, and for refusing to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the lobby of his courthouse in 2003.

Moore was seen as what he is – a true conservative and a firebrand at that, someone who, like Trump, would light the establishment on fire and destroy its power, and someone who would not be afraid to be controversial in the cause of what is truly right, especially in that he follows the traditional Christian worldview very strongly.  For him, religious practice is not just something to be talked about, it is something to be lived.

This, again, is much like the brazen honesty that we see in President Trump himself.

The aforementioned “establishment” should be explained here. In this author’s estimation, the “establishment” politicians are those who seem to forget that they are in Congress to serve the American people they were elected to represent.  Now, while it has been a long time since the United States truly functioned as the representative republic its Constitution defines it to be, in relatively recent decades, the disconnect between DC and the rest of the nation seems to have increased beyond belief. Many times, citizens of the USA, in either party, could be heard to complain that Congress does not serve anyone but itself, and, depending on who the party in power was, we could be sure that the party not in power would be rife with complaints about how “elitism” of the party in power hurt the average American.

In 2014, though, it appeared that more Americans than usual got a rude awakening to just how widely true this assertion was.  In that year there was a midterm election, and it was extremely significant, because the result of it was that the Senate went from being a Democrat majority to a Republican majority.

Even more significant was how this happened.  In an unusual development, the GOP had no overall party platform that each GOP candidate used as their core message in his or her campaign.  Each GOP winner, whether in the Senate or House, won because their message was “I am going to stop Obama.”

I am going to stop Obama.  If you elect me, we will stop his “fundamental transformation” of America and make things right, (get them back as they used to be).

That was the message, and every candidate that ran on this message was victorious.

But then came the betrayal.

In case by case, bill by bill, the new GOP majority capitulated to Democrat minority pressure in almost every single bill or measure proposed.  The GOP had majorities in both houses.  They could effectively stop Obama and his policies in their tracks.  But they didn’t.  And they didn’t again.  And again.  Sometimes we heard the GOP congressmen claim that they were trying to “position themselves” to do something really significant, but they almost never did it.

Understanding this series of events, what this author calls “the Great GOP Betrayal of 2014”, is perhaps the main cause of the phenomenon that is Donald Trump, and his unexpected and dramatic election victory.

There were a whole lot of American citizens, this one included, that held no trust for Congress, GOP or Democrat.  Trump won the nomination because even Ted Cruz still played politics.  The American conservatives had been betrayed one too many times, and they sensed this and all it took was Senator Cruz playing the game of expediency in politics once or twice, and that was all.

Donald Trump said all the wrong things, to all the people they needed to be said to, and this both frightened and thrilled many of us.  We were frightened because for almost fifty years the vaunted American right to freedom of speech had been increasingly snuffed out by political correctness Thought Police, and Mr. Trump said these things anyway, and we feared for the end of his political career, even though we strongly agreed with him.  We were thrilled because we saw that it wasn’t only ourselves that felt what he said, but that many of our friends still did, too, only we had been silenced by the Left.

Judge Moore is one of these kind of people.  Flamboyant, but honest.  Although the man was long involved in politics, many conservatives saw the same necessary spirit in him, the same fire to overturn the conventional way things are done, and to flout political correctness and other liberal maxims and to make America great again. It was precisely along these lines that Steve Bannon promoted Judge Moore and backed his candidacy.

But something happened along the way.  A number of women surfaced with strange stories, claiming that when Judge Moore was in his early thirties, he tried to have relationships with them while they were teenagers.

The scandal surrounding this was immediate and widespread.  The story was broken in such a way as to paint a picture of the Judge as some sort of child molester, because the age difference was so huge as to be inappropriate or perverted.

The press managed to be slightly subtle in that the strength of the allegations was in their indirect sense of innuendo.

This had an extremely effective impact on the nation, and it began to unravel the Judge’s chances.  Even President Trump was cautious in his response to this matter, saying, correctly but cautiously, “If Judge Moore did these things, he should do the right thing and exit the campaign.”

To President Trump’s credit, this was precisely correct.  However, it didn’t help.

Further, Judge Moore actually damaged himself much more in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, when he was vague, answering “not generally, no” to the question about if he was “dating girls that young at that time.” He further appeared to step in it when he said that he did not recall ever dating any girl without the permission of her mother.

Hannity charged ahead because these answers were far too ambiguous for him, and one thing this author knows personally about Sean is that he is a man of his word.  Sean Hannity is a man that is definitely responsive to his own conscience, and he is not one to brush things under the rug like this.  And true to form, he didn’t, and gave the Judge 24 hours to clean this mess up, saying “You must immediately and fully come up with a satisfactory explanation for your inconsistencies… If [Moore] can’t do this, [he] needs to get out of this race.”

Judge Moore did so, in an open letter through Twitter addressed to Sean, but available for all to read.

He also continued from that point until the election to firmly and completely deny the allegations against him.  However, in a strange turn, the weekend before the election, he disappeared for a couple days.  Also, in an appearance very close to the election, his wife committed a blunder by saying “we are not anti-Semitic, one of our lawyers is a Jew!”

This writer remembers, as an Alabama kid myself, watching a TV commercial in the 1970’s about Jimmy’s Jewish friend.  I learned that a good way of showing you’re prejudiced is to try to say you are not.  It would seem that Mrs. Moore missed the commercial.

The damage was done.  The media was out to get Judge Moore, and their disinformation campaign worked wonders.  This author did not even know about the reply the Judge gave until researching for this piece.  This, though this writer intensely follows the news aggregators and websites that support conservative candidates.

Eventually, as we know, President Trump endorsed Moore and did it in a very pragmatic way:  Look at what he stands for, and look at what the other guy has stood for.  But it wasn’t quite enough, and on the night of December 12, Doug Jones, a Democrat, became the first Democrat Senator-Elect in Alabama in 25 years.

Now, the Democrat party is crowing with great confidence about the “victory” in this election and the certainty that 2018 is going to be the year that swings their way again.  This author wants to make a few predictions about the next set of events we will likely see, but then there is something more important to be said.

(1) The “allegations” against Judge Roy Moore will seem to vanish, because there is no need to bring them up anymore since he has been defeated in the election. This is a problem. If these allegations really had merit, they should be pursued. But they won’t be.

(2) NEW allegations with much greater ferocity will be brought against President Trump and selected GOP individuals, all of whom show greatly conservative leanings. Since that is not many, most of the attention will be on Trump. I think we can note that this has already started, but it will amplify radically because the people who used this tactic against Moore will believe it can work against the President.

(3) The Democrats will get very bold about 2018 (again we already see this in statements by Sen. Charles “Chuck” Schumer and no doubt Rep. Nancy Pelosi will chime in if she hasn’t already) – and the Dems will act like they are completely in control.

(4) This will lead to some very interesting public drama, but it will also cloud the picture. If our President is smart (and he is), he will probably use this situation very positively. He has already started by congratulating Senator-Elect Jones, and this is certainly appropriate. I suspect that Jones is more extreme on the liberal side than even HE knows, but at the same time, I think he will also (at least on his own) be rather amenable to Trump. The key here is how much pressure can Jones take from the others in his party.

This author believes that President Trump can snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat.  He is already doing so.  However, the president’s great talents notwithstanding, there is a problem that has to be faced.

We do not know if Judge Moore misbehaved thirty years ago.  But his campaign was destroyed by these allegations, and one major one was proved to be at least a partial fabrication, the altered yearbook signature, which was “tweaked” for the purpose of this slander.

In the campaign, “character” was raised as an issue, but in reality it was slander and gossip that brought this candidate down, and nothing more.  The awesome power of the mass media on a population that has been largely taught to avoid critical thinking, but instead to “go with the flow”, has worked a sad wonder here.

You see, these stories magically appeared forty years after they supposedly took place, timed perfectly to coincide with the intended defeat of a political candidate twenty-eight days before his possible election. This was a November surprise that worked where the October Surprise attempt against Donald Trump last year (the Access Hollywood – Billy Bush video clip) didn’t.

This author is almost sure the allegations are false and only fabricated because of the necessity to defeat this renegade candidate at all costs.  As predicted above, time will bear this idea out.  We shall see.

But a problem exists as to why (1) the American people do not seem to be able to smell the rat in this situation, and (2) the politicians attempt not to be blunt in the face of a need by the American people to be so.

In this, the power of political correctness, secular humanist “compassion” and militant feminism all worked very effectively to damage President Trump’s ability to move the country to a better place.

It seems that the first issue, the populace’s perceived inability to smell a rat, is actually the reflection of a real need. The need for honesty.

Americans are people that crave honesty.  Many of us admire Donald Trump simply because he says what he thinks.  If we disagree, we disagree, but at least we know, and we know without the shadow of a doubt.  Judge Moore gave us a big shadow of doubt, and that was fodder for the dishonesty brigade that is the mainstream media in the United States.

The second part of this problem is that a great number of our people have been taken in by the influence of what can only truly be called “cultural Marxism” but which bears the face of “progress” and “compassion” and even “repentance for our nation’s crimes.”

This impulse, to be compassionate and fair at all costs actually does come with a cost, because our standards for what constitute compassion and care have been altered.  Instead of honesty and responsibility, for example, we espouse entitlement and victimhood.  Instead of changing our own lives to become better people, we insist that the world around us is unfair, and we try to change the externals, including other people’s behavior, or our own recording and retelling of history, to make ourselves feel better.

We stop trusting the gut instinct of conscience in ourselves and instead we espouse the “groupthink” that is handed to us by the forces of “common sense”, unmindful that we already possess enough common sense to know that garbage really IS garbage.  Finally, we all do it together.  As denizens of the fishbowl, it becomes hard to see that we are really being played, and if we try to look, sometimes the sheer discomfort of what we begin to see is enough to make us want to “take the blue pill” and shrink back into blissful, willful ignorance.

The gift of being able to see that reality is NOT groupthink, and that people can express it fearlessly and powerfully, is the gift of such people as President Trump, Rand Paul, Rudy Giuliani, Sarah Sanders, and Steve Bannon, politically speaking.  It is also fomented by the publications of what are called the “alternative media”, who are alternative simply because the writers and journalists and analysts have laid claim to their desire to think things through, critically for themselves, and then share their thoughts with their audiences, not to obtain just another slavish group of drones that think their way, but who think critically for themselves.

This ability to think honestly and critically, to analyze things with open-mindedness that is not enslaved to the socially “acceptable” themes of the day, this is our work as citizens – each one of us is called to do this.

The United States’ great success as a young nation was at its best when its people engaged in critical thought.  We squabbled a lot, argued a lot and it was intense at times, but honest people make things happen.  The fuzzy warm feel-good of groupthink has been largely responsible for taking our freedom away.  If we want to make the most of the chance that has been given us, hopefully this piece has illustrated some of how we, personally and as a people, can accomplish this.