A Saturnalia Wish Come True: Some Sanity From the Alabama Special Election

So I just wanna make sure that this is real and that enough Alabama voters turned out to elect Doug Jones over alleged human skeeve Roy Moore:

In a major upset, Democrat Doug Jones won the Alabama Senate special election on Tuesday to fill the seat previously held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The last time Alabama sent a Democrat to the Senate was in 1992.

The Associated Press called the race for Jones just before 10:30 p.m. eastern.

Alabama is a deeply conservative state. But the race unexpectedly became competitive after multiple women came forward to allege that Republican Roy Moore had made advances toward them as teenage girls, including groping and assault. The result was a stunning victory for the Democratic Party, which has been locked out of power in Washington after the 2016 presidential election.

Insert Happy Dance Here.

Some rough observations in the wake of good tidings and cheer:

• Voter turnout remains the thing that Democrats have to work on. For these midterm-type elections outside of the Presidential cycle, turnout is shockingly low. But this election where the turnout was expected to be around 25 percent, the state GOTV efforts bumped the turnout to 38 percent (still bad, but SO MUCH BETTER than expected).
  Jones' victory - pushed by a ground-game that learned from their failures in 2016 and adapted to a more aggressive effort - alongside the earlier results in Virginia and New Jersey proves the 50-State Strategy can (and SHOULD) work.
• Black voters were the major contributors to Jones' win. It helped that the Republican candidate Roy "Banned from the Mall" Moore was an unrepentant scuzbucket on racial and sexism issues. When Moore was caught at a speech praising how "great things were when we had slavery, even for the slaves" that was just one more motivator among African-Americans to GET TEH DAMN VOTE OUT. Most Blacks are, for what I know, very spiritual and religious in that state but NOT evangelical, meaning that they weren't buying the snake oil from the local White Evangelical pastors who proclaimed Moore a perfect God-inspired candidate.
  And this was IN SPITE OF a massive voter suppression effort committed by the State-level Republicans in charge of the electoral process. For every Black voter who had to fight over getting illegally shunted to INACTIVE Voter status, for every Black voter who had to march past county sheriffs parked illegally outside polling places as intimidation tactics, for every Black voter likely lied to about whether their votes mattered... YOUR VOTES MATTERED, and THANK YOU.
  This should also be a reminder to the Democratic Party at the national level that YES, the Black Vote is a key foundation of their support. The ongoing media chatter about "changing" the party message to attract "Working Class Whites" - AKA Racists who flipped to trump - should go away. Democrats need to focus on the voters they HAVE and just need to get to vote, and make themselves attractive to the Independent voters who aren't lost to a haze of racial hatred. You're not getting those trump voters back, Dems. They're lost. Get the voters - the moderates, the pragmatists, the ones who want government to WORK - who matter. The 50-State Model of nationwide campaigning worked in 2006, and it can work in 2018. Jones' win proves it.
• This is a big blow to the Republican election schemes. For the past four decades, they've plotted out a game-plan of winning thanks to Geography and Demographics, using both to carve out Congressional gerrymanders to win the House and then using the small-population (and more conservative) states to garner enough control of the Senate. While a Senate election can't be gerrymandered, the state of Alabama was so Social Conservative for decades that it had become a "Safe" seat for any conservative candidate, effectively gerrymandered for the Senate.
  No more. The Demographics are starting - finally - to turn against the Geography of Elections. Voters under 40 leaned Democrat for Jones and in the earlier off-year elections in Virginia and New Jersey the youth voters went Democrat by around 70 percent. That will be the largest voting bloc - bolstered by a Millennial age group that's more politically involved than the slacker Gen-Xers - in the 2018 Midterms.
  And given the large-scale efforts Republicans are attempting to pull with voter suppression, they're failing at that: voter turnout was higher than normal (which sucks) for non-Presidential cycles, and that overwhelms any attempt to deny voters from their access to the ballot box. The GOP running the elections offices can come up with a lot of ways to stop (minority and youthful) voters, but they can't stop all of them.
  Granted, it took a candidate as evil as Moore to shake things up, but when you look at how close the results were the GOP STILL LOST in otherwise "safe" Alabama. If this had been a special election in a state that wasn't normally +30 or more Conservative/Republican, say a state like Florida that leans Democratic but still has Republicans winning by +2 or so, the Democratic candidate could have snagged a larger win percentage.
  There may be "safe" Red States like West Virginia and Utah and Wyoming out there, but given the voter anger there's no guarantee anymore. The unsafe "competitive" Purple states are now going to be massive fights that the Dems can win. And too many states that were once reliable Red States - hi, Texas! hi, Georgia! hi, Kansas - aren't going to be reliable anymore.
• Following on that point, this is why this should bother Republicans: THEY ARE RUNNING OUT OF NOT-EVIL CANDIDATES TO NOMINATE. Their ongoing purging of moderate, centrist candidates in lieu of extremist, ignorant demagogues - who turn out to be crooks, perverts, or worse - is getting to the point where they can't win in "Safe" seats with such candidates. Any attempt to run a rational lower-case conservative is going to get stomped during the Primaries by the Fox Not-News fueled voter base that bought all in on trump and his ilk. Alabama HAD a sane candidate in Luther Strange, but the primary voters choose Roy Moore whose history of inflamed rhetoric, unhinged religious views, and outright anti-Establishment positions appeased the Far Right but horrified everyone else.
  Granted, if the sexual assaults never went public - which tells you how important it is for actual media like the Washington Post to dig up these things - Moore could have eked out a win. But given his nature, SOMETHING else could have come up to make enough general voters recoil in horror. The man was a walking disease.
  And the Republican leadership has to realize that Moore is the only kind of candidate that can win their Primaries anymore. They need to rethink their need for ethical standards in candidates if they hope to retain the "safe" seats they got. But going that route - bringing in more moderate candidates - will outrage their base anyway and they'd get primaried by Moore-type whackos. They've fallen into a particularly nasty Catch-22.
• Speaking of extremist, ignorant demagogues, this election was as much a referendum on trump as it was on the Republican Party.
  The evidence is there: trump is a drag on the GOP. Both times he went into Alabama to campaign for "his" choice - first for Strange, then for Moore - and both times "his" choice lost.
  While trump wasn't noticeably toxic in Alabama - his approval/disapproval balanced out at 48/48 - he still wasn't any help. In other Red States, trump's disapproval is worse.
  Any idea that trump voters will be there for other Republican candidates in the midterms should be laughed off. As of right now, the Republicans are on their own. Bringing in trump to campaign for you might actually lead to your defeat.
  But the Republicans can't ignore trump either. They're stuck, tied to a blowhard liar whose popularity numbers ought to be lower than the 32-33 percent he's at right now. trump may be enormously popular with the Far Right base, giving him control of the Republicans... but the number of self-described Republicans is dropping, meaning at the broader level of GOP-Indy-Dem the GOP is going to be a superminority party by the time 2020 rolls around. We're getting to the point where gerrymandering and fearmongering isn't going to be enough to bully the Republicans to victory.

What now, mad cow?

Right now, trump is behaving like he never really backed Moore in the first place. his ire towards the rest of the GOP making him look bad is going to create greater divide between him and the party leadership.

Right now, there's a large number of Alabama voters quietly taking their Roy Moore bumper stickers off their coal-roller trucks. There may be a lot of hard Right voters who'll still proudly claim their bona fides, but even they have to feel some shame in having sided with a goddamn pedophile.

Right now, the Congressional Republicans are trying to finish up their conference tax cut bill before their own internal deadlines and before Jones can show up to become a bigger stumbling block. They didn't have much room to maneuver their massively unpopular tax cut for the rich bill before, to where three Republican Senators could say "no" to a bad bill like they did to stop the "Kill Obamacare" bill. Now they're down to two GOP Senators who can say "no"... and there are enough Senators in vulnerable elections who may be more interested in saving their own skins with voters back home (or have already pledged to retire and thus have nothing to lose).

Right now, the Democrats need to take the strategies they had for winning in Alabama and weaponize it. They need to go back to the Fifty-State Strategy that worked so well in 2006 and 2008. They need to push a unifying Get-Out-The-Vote effort to ensure large turnouts that benefit them. If they can win in Alabama (albeit in bizarre circumstances) they can win ANYWHERE.

Know hope.

A Letter to Alabama Today

To the state of Alabama:

Today is a special election to fill the US Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions when he got picked to f-ck up our nation as Attorney General under trump.

This election is a very simple choice.

Alabama voters must choose between The Democrat or The Goddamn Pedophile.

A quick word from the YouTuber known as Liberal Redneck:

Everything known to date about Roy Moore is that he's a showboating, twice-exiled ex-judge who deems himself God's Chosen while violating many of the rules and requests of the Lord and of Jesus. Topping that is the recent revelations that Moore is a known skeeve who stalked after teenage girls at shopping malls and their high schools while he was in his 30s. In one case actively violating Alabama's Statutory Rape laws by seducing and groping a 14-YEAR-OLD GIRL while serving as a state prosecutor (he cannot argue ignorance of the law: the SONOFABITCH was supposed to be upholding it!).

Roy Moore represents EVERYTHING that is wrong with today's Southern region of the United States: an arrogant, self-serving hypocrite who espouses racist and sexist ideology that fights to keep the Deep South states mired in the mindset - and the economic backwardness - of the 1850s.

Doug Jones the Democrat is, well, a Democrat. He's stood for civil rights and fought the KKK, convicted those who bombed a Birmingham church killing four girls back in 1963 (the case finally got prosecuted by 1998, which tells you how hard it is to get justice in the South when it comes to civil rights). He's been described as "middle-of-the-road" on his politics, meaning he's no Bernie Sanders.

And yet there are still Alabamans who think that makes Jones WORSE than a GODDAMN PEDOPHILE.

This is your choice now, Alabama. Your vote for Doug Jones will send a practical, level-headed, scandal-less Democrat to the US Senate to represent you and your state. Or you can vote for the GODDAMN PEDOPHILE who will proceed to embarrass you and your state for another 100 years. You vote for Moore and you will NEVER live it down: Every nasty stereotype of southern assholery will be confirmed for now and all the years to come.

You wanna spite the rest of the nation and the world by voting for the GODDAMN PEDOPHILE. Go ahead. You will mark yourself as standing with the monsters that condemn and assault your own communities forever. Hell of a bargain, as the Devil would tell you.

How Low CAN We Go?

I used to have faith in my fellow human beings that there was some level of common sense to prevent the worst of what we can do to ourselves.

But in the wake of watching 62 million Americans buy into the trumpian BS, becoming willing accomplices in the Crime of the Century, my faith has been shattered. I still cannot comprehend how so many voters genuinely thought trump was a better choice than Hillary. And while I knew that a lot of the Far Right were hypocrites about faith and Christian grace, for so many of them to eagerly embrace a self-avowed pussy-grabber and greedhead in trump seems a betrayal of absolutely everything Jesus stands for.

I still cannot comprehend some of the progressives I know on Facebook and Twitter who openly argue that Hillary would have been just as bad a warmonger and ripoff artist as trump. They've become so convinced that Bernie could have won that they've blinded themselves to how bad trump really is.

Who thinks like that?

This is why this week is going to be so troubling. This Tuesday, Alabama will have their Special Election to fill a Senate seat.

The choice is between a Democrat in Doug Jones who's been an effective prosecutor, with a clear track record of civil rights defense and pragmatic policies that lean Center-Left on the spectrum. The kind of person you think rational Alabamans would support to lead their state into the 21st Century.

The other choice is Republican Roy Moore. The Roy Moore who openly proclaims himself God's Chosen eager to put the Ten Commandments on display as though that would enforce God's will, while violating half of those Commandments on a daily basis. Roy Moore, who openly contends that slavery was great, everyone liked it including the slaves, and shows every sign of wanting to bring those days back.  Roy Moore, who allegedly stalked and molested HIGH SCHOOL GIRLS when he was in his 30s. This is the kind of person who represents every worst aspect of Alabama and the Deep South, the long dark shadow of Slavery and Jim Crow that still haunts this region, combined with the sexist Patriarchy of Far Right religious views of women as playthings and breeders.

And there's every possibility enough Alabamans will close their eyes to everything WRONG about Roy Moore and vote for him.

All because the Conservative mindset of Alabamans excuses every sin a fellow Conservative - now Republican - could and did commit.

All because they've been ingrained over generations to HATE anything that reeks of liberal values that now associate with the Democratic Party.

All because there are enough of us who want everything to burn in the Hellfire that these Republican crooks and hypocrites will inflict on the entire world.

There may be, hopefully, a chance that Doug Jones wins, that enough Alabamans are repulsed by Moore's extremism and sins to turn away. But after what happened in 2016, I can't believe that.

We are so royally fucked, America.

And it's your damned fault, Republicans, for letting us sink this low.

You could have stopped all this. You could have shown some ethical standards and kept trump off the ticket in 2015 when he so clearly came out on a racist, hate-filled agenda. But now you're stuck, like the rest of us. And it's getting worse.

Moore shouldn't have won the primary earlier. You had a standard level evil-doing Hard Right candidate in Luther Strange, but he wasn't hate-filled enough and your own primary voters went with crazy asshat Moore.

And do you think Moore will be the lowest point?

Your voting base can now easily forgive PEDOPHILES as long as they are librul bashers. Your voting base will easily go for the most racist, most sexist, most insane candidate on the ticket because they've bought into your party's nihilistic views on governance.

But you can't control that. For all the dogma and certainty these Far Right candidates present, they will not recognize common sense in any way shape or form. They will pander to the most vicious instinct and destroy everything our nation - even things YOUR OWN PARTY respects - built up for the last 200 years.

Until the Republicans and their media enablers wake up to the damage these extremist candidates present, we are going to get the WORST OF THE WORST coming out of Alabama and every other hardcore Red State.

Gods help us.

We are so very royally fucked.

Trespass

So there'd been stories about Roy Moore told around his hometown of how he'd stalk teenage girls at the local shopping mall back in the late 1970s.

When I was branch manager at Centennial Park Library, I had to issue a handful of trespass orders on unruly teens who hung out in the area, hassling library users and stuff.

It's a huge process. You have to call in the cops, file the trespass, file an incident report for the county gov't, and then when the banned person showed up calling the sheriff's office to hurry over and confront the violator about that trespass.

Most of the ones who got trespassed stayed away. There was one who kept violating it but sneaking off - the library was in the middle of a neighborhood, so it was easy - before the cops showed. They finally got him, and enforced the trespass order complete with arresting him and dragging him off in handcuffs.

It turned out they had that teen on more than just trespass. He'd been a suspect in local break-ins and acts of vandalism (there were other things, but I can't verify those charges), bad enough to where they were holding him without bail. The last time I saw the kid, this was 2008 maybe, it was in a courtroom on a preliminary hearing about his charges (I was called in to provide witness. I found out the prosecutor's office had triple-charged the teen on that trespass, so I told them it was just the one charge, but that probably didn't help him considering the more serious stuff he was facing).

I'm rehashing all of this today because of recent news about Senate candidate Roy Moore: how an investigating reporter dug up story after story about how Moore back in 1979 had been banned from a shopping mall because he was there all the time trying to pick up teenage girls (this was when he was in his 30s!). To get banned from any place to where the police were notified and scanning for you is a big fucking deal. That Moore kept doing this - that he kept showing up even after the ban trying to pick up girls - highlights how obsessed he was chasing after them, and how problematic it had to be if a sizable number of witnesses STILL REMEMBER HE DID THIS STUFF 30 YEARS AGO.

Remember, kids: a Sexual Predator does not stop at one victim, or four, or forty. He keeps going until someone actually stops him and he goes to jail. And even then, he'll likely keep trying, because it's all he knows to do.

That he stalked a shopping mall while he was employed as a District Attorney - even after being warned, even after being banned - points to the horrifying truth that Moore could not be trusted to uphold the laws of his state. Moore placed himself above the law.

How easy do you think it is for a bastard like that to place himself above God?

Such trespass should not be accepted by the faithful or skeptic alike. What the hell, Alabama. What the hell, Republicans.

This is insane.

One More Thought About Those Who Are Defending Roy Moore's Unethical Behavior Towards Teenage Girls

Even space cowboys understood that child molesters rank low on societal norms.

Are you beginning to understand just what you are defending, Republicans?

You are defending a man in Roy Moore who took advantage of teenage girls. A man who is clearly going to the Special Hell they reserve for child molesters, and people who talk at movie theaters.

It's a level of Hell so deep even Satan, trapped in that lake of ice, is gonna look at Roy Moore and say "Damn, son, even *I* didn't fall that far into Hell."

And just remember, Republicans, there's room in Hell for those who side with such false prophets and betrayers of God's Grace.

This Is the Republican Talking Point Concerning Roy Moore

As of this afternoon, this has been the most common response I've seen on Social Media defending Republican Senatorial candidate Roy Moore over accusations he stalked and dated HIGH SCHOOL GIRLS while he was in his early-to-mid 30s:

If you're wondering who Eric Dondero is, and if you can't see his Twitter Bio in the bottom left corner, here's a copy of that Bio:

Liberty-Identitarian. Social Darwinist, Rugged Individualist, #MAGA Republican, US Rep Ron Paul '97-03, Travel 25 nations/5 conts, Spk 5 langs, US Navy Vet, FSU

Dondero is one of those hard-core Far Right "Individualist" #MAGA types. Who probably sent a ton of FEMA funds requests after getting flooded out this hurricane season.

Happily advertising himself as a Social Darwinist is pretty much all you need to know about how racist a son-of-a-bitch we're dealing with right off the bat.

This is Dondero's position: He will happily back child molesters into one of the highest offices of the nation all because Democrats are even worse.

Just to clarify, there are roughly 750,000 registered sex offenders in the United States as of 2012. The number may well be higher but for the most part it's under one million. Given the overall population for the US is 310 million, that's about 0.002 rounded up, in terms of percentages that's 0.2 Percent of the population. Less Than One Percent.

Meanwhile, there's roughly 96 MILLION registered Democrats across the nation. Not every state lists actual numbers, so we have to extrapolate from the number who self-identify in polling, which is around 31 percent of Americans polled.

Alabama does not list voter registration by party, so at best guess based on the 2016 Generals there were 729,000 who voted for Hillary. There are almost as many Democrats in Alabama as there are sex offenders across all 50 states.

This Dondero fellow is saying he and his partisan side of the aisle will happily accuse 96 MILLION AMERICANS of being WORSE than pedophiles/sex offenders. This sentiment is similar to other Tweeters I've seen online.

Because this is how low the Republican Party has sunk into partisan madness.

They've been told for 40-50-80 years (probably all the way back to FDR) that Democrats were the enemy: A bunch of hippie pot-smoking tree huggers who hate our troops and want to steal everyone's candy under the catch-all nightmare of DREADED SOCIALISM.

This hatred of Democrats, of Libruls and Progressives and Feminazis and Soros-backed Black/Latino street gangs has been hammered in through an increasingly fact-less Right Wing Noise Machine, where their side of GOD GUNS AND TAX CUTS can do wrong and THE HILLARY-OBUMMER CONSPIRACY WILL KILL US ALL.

Rather than concede the likelihood that their Senate candidate in Alabama is an Ephebophile (new word for the day, kids! Now you know what to call those creeps who pop up on your Snapchat) who broke Statutory Rape laws by dating/molesting a 14-YEAR-OLD when Moore was 32, rather than consider Moore's own conflicting excuses as the stories pile up, The Republican and Evangelical faithful would rather let a man they shouldn't ever trust their daughters/granddaugthers with in private get elected to the Senate instead of a Democratic candidate in Doug Jones who just 1) happens to be successful prosecuting the KKK, and 2) not a sex offender.

In only one way can I even understand WHY the Republicans are acting like this: It's because they are stuck on their obsessed mission to pass a tax-cuts bill for their super-rich SuperPAC backers, and their hold on the Senate is tenuous at 52 seats out of 100 (with Pence as tie-breaker). They lose this seat to Jones, they will have only enough wiggle room to lose ONE Republican Senator - because the Democrats are lock-step in opposition to any tax-cuts for the rich - to any upcoming tax bill. Given how not every GOP Senator agrees with what should be cut (moderates like Collins are not on board with eliminating the Estate Tax or giving cuts to those over $1 million in income)  the Hard Right that wants those unpopular cuts will never get that agenda passed. So they NEED Moore - who will gladly sign off on those tax cuts to appease his "Fuck All Those To the Left of Barry Goldwater" mindset - to win at all costs, even at the costs of their own reputations as moralists and Godly Christians.

You always wonder where the Moral Event Horizon is for certain people. How far they will go into that black hole of Total Evil just to destroy everyone else in the process.

Well, we are finding that Moral Event Horizon right now for the Republican Party. They are perfectly willing to cross this line and stand before God and America as Pro-Pedophile.

Goddamn them.

And Goddamn the voters of Alabama if they close their eyes to this and vote for a Goddamn Child Molester.

Indefensible

Sickening.

Leigh Corfman says she was 14 years old when an older man approached her outside a courtroom in Etowah County, Ala. She was sitting on a wooden bench with her mother, they both recall, when the man introduced himself as Roy Moore.

It was early 1979 and Moore — now the Republican nominee in Alabama for a U.S. Senate seat — was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney. He struck up a conversation, Corfman and her mother say, and offered to watch the girl while her mother went inside for a child custody hearing...

Alone with Corfman, Moore chatted with her and asked for her phone number, she says. Days later, she says, he picked her up around the corner from her house in Gadsden, drove her about 30 minutes to his home in the woods, told her how pretty she was and kissed her. On a second visit, she says, he took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes. He touched her over her bra and underpants, she says, and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear.

“I wanted it over with — I wanted out,” she remembers thinking. “Please just get this over with. Whatever this is, just get it over.” Corfman says she asked Moore to take her home, and he did.

Just to note, the age of consent in Alabama was and still is sixteen. Leigh Corfman was fourteen when this started. No matter how you excuse this, it was... it IS statutory rape.

And Moore was a district attorney at the time. HE'S SUPPOSED TO KNOW THE LAW. HE'S SUPPOSED TO UPHOLD IT.

Two of Corfman’s childhood friends say she told them at the time that she was seeing an older man, and one says Corfman identified the man as Moore. Wells says her daughter told her about the encounter more than a decade later, as Moore was becoming more prominent as a local judge.

Aside from Corfman, three other women interviewed by The Washington Post in recent weeks say Moore pursued them when they were between the ages of 16 and 18 and he was in his early 30s, episodes they say they found flattering at the time, but troubling as they got older. None of the three women say that Moore forced them into any sort of relationship or sexual contact.

Moore may not have forced them, but he went after them sexually. An older man, chasing after HIGH SCHOOL AGE GIRLS.

Wendy Miller says she was 14 and working as a Santa’s helper at the Gadsden Mall when Moore first approached her, and 16 when he asked her on dates, which her mother forbade. Debbie Wesson Gibson says she was 17 when Moore spoke to her high school civics class and asked her out on the first of several dates that did not progress beyond kissing. Gloria Thacker Deason says she was an 18-year-old cheerleader when Moore began taking her on dates that included bottles of Mateus Rosé wine. The legal drinking age in Alabama was 19.

Of the four women, the youngest at the time was Corfman, who is the only one who says she had sexual contact with Moore that went beyond kissing. She says they did not have intercourse...

I actually started writing this blog entry last night, but I've been so enraged by this story and the expanding revelations that it's taking me this long to compose myself to compose this.

And before any of you lot jump on me for being a Bill Clinton fan considering all the sexist shit he's pulled, I have condemned Bill's sexual dalliances as folly and wrongheaded. And for all the accusations aimed at him - especially a possible rape allegation that has some teeth to it - Clinton's never been a teen stalker (His affair with Lewinsky happened when she was 22).

I have no love for sexual predators. I really have no love for holier-than-thou religious hypocrites who eagerly bash everyone else for being sinful while they themselves commit greater sins.

And in the time it's taken for me to write this out, OF COURSE there are many Republican political figures at the Alabama and National levels who are making the immoral decision to BACK Moore even as these stories threaten to expose more sordid tales.

I came across this on Twitter this afternoon:

Carroll Bryant‏ @CarrollBryant

Replying to @tpe3tpj2 @FiveRights

I'd rather have a pedophile in office rather than a democrat any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Pedophiles only screw kids while democrats screw everyone.

7:30 AM - 10 Nov 2017

THIS IS coming from a self-proclaimed arch-conservative (yet proudly) INDEPENDENT VOTER who seems to genuinely think that Democrats are the ultimate scourge of humanity.

THIS is how low the Far Right have sunk. Their hate and disdain for Democrats, progressives, and essentially EVERYBODY NOT IN THEIR CLOSED CIRCLE have gotten them to where they will proudly, eagerly vote in corrupt, contemptible, violent monsters all because they've been taught that Democrats are worse.

This is how trump got into the White House. Enough voters bought the Fox Not-News Narrative of DEMOCRATS BAD that when caught between the choice of A) the corrupt and bankrupted failed businessman with no experience or intellect and who bragged about being a Pussy-Grabber assaulting his own partners' wives or B) the Democratic candidate who just happened to be Hillary Clinton the MOST HATED DEMOCRAT THE REPUBLICANS AND FAR RIGHT EVER HATED SIMPLY BECAUSE SHE EXISTS, they sided with the corrupt and failed bankrupt businessman who SURPRISE SURPRISE is incapable of governance and has been committing impeachable acts in office since Day One (not to mention mismanaging the nation into a chaotic mess that will collapse on itself. It's not a question of IF it's a matter of WHEN).

The Republicans would rather vote in criminals, sexual predators, con artists all because those dark forces offer them the fantasy of power and control, of being lords of the realms rather than the poor unwashed masses they deem parasites.

There may be sexual predators and con artists among the Democratic ranks - Anthony Weiner, John Edwards, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer - but when exposed for their sins they fall out of favor/power and even wind up in jail (save for Clinton, whose predatory nature balanced out with a persona that presented itself as pro-women even as he skirt-chased them). Republican campaigners and voters excuse their monsters - Bill O'Reilly just got his job back even after public exposure of his harassment of women, David Vitter got re-elected after getting caught hiring call girls, Newt Gingrich never goes away after getting caught committing adultery, Mark Sanford may have lost his governorship but South Carolinians voted him to Congress, and for the love of GOD they voted trump - and eagerly push them higher into elected offices or bigger book deals.

This is insane. The Republican Party keeps claiming they are the "Family Values Party" but the only value they see in families is how much they can shred those families into poverty-stricken, emotionally scarred, and physically abused wrecks. Family Values, my ass.

Their ongoing support of a monster like Roy Moore by using twisted interpretations of Biblical teachings is proof the Republican Far Right - self-proclaimed moralists who praise themselves as God's Chosen thumping those Bibles as though they were weapons - are no true Christians. They're just selling another lie about their faith, because they ONLY THING they believe is winning elections and destroying innocent lives.

When I wrote that the Republican Party was dead, this was what I meant. There is no soul here, no empathy or morality or ethical practice that would make a political party work. Just cons and criminals, issuing lie after lie and committing sin after sin, a shambling zombie infecting the nation and the world with their taint.

What the hell, America.

What the hell, Alabama, that you should side with the child rapist to represent you. What the hell.