=========
=========
Promoted from the diaries by streiff. Promotion does not imply endorsement.
=========
=========

When Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, the man with the best Southern name ever! resigned from the United States Senate to become President Trump’s first Attorney General, Luther Strange was appointed to fill the seat by Governor Robert Bentley (R-AB) until a special election could be held. Senator Strange (R-AB) then lost in the Republican primary to former Judge Roy Moore. Mr Moore had been backed by Steve Bannon, and won the primary runoff election, even though President trump had (sort of) supported Mr Strange.

Then, well after Mr Moore had won the Republican nomination, allegations that, as a man in his thirties, he had pursued teenaged girls for sex emerged, allegations which he denied. However, there were enough women who came forward that the allegations were widely believed:

During Moore’s election campaign for the Senate, a total of nine women accused Moore of inappropriate sexual or social conduct. Three of the women said they had been sexually assaulted by Moore when they were aged 14, 16, and 28. The other six described him pursuing a romantic relationship with them while he was in his 30s and they were as young as 16, but said there had not been any inappropriate sexual contact. Moore denied the sexual assault allegations, but did not dispute that he had approached or dated teenagers over the age of 16 (the age of consent in Alabama). Independent witnesses confirmed that Moore had a reputation for approaching teenage girls, often at a local mall, and asking them out.

The clincher was that Mr Moore admitted to pursuing and dating teenaged girls when he was an attorney and in his thirties. Whether or not he actually sexually assaulted underaged girls no longer mattered; it was assumed by many — including myself, though I am not an Alabama voter — that the allegations were believable, even if not provable in a court of law.

At any rate, the esteemed Mr Moore took what should have been the safest Republican seat in the United States Senate and turned it into a Democratic one, as Doug Jones took 671,151 votes (49.9%) to Mr Moore’s 650,436 votes (48.4%).

And now, Mr Moore wants to lose the seat again! From The Washington Post:

Alabama’s Roy Moore is ‘seriously considering’ a 2020 Senate run

By Deanna Paul | March 9, 2019 | 10:59 AM EST

Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) may face Roy Moore, his 2017 special election opponent, in Alabama’s 2020 U.S. Senate race. The former chief justice of the state’s supreme court announced he is “seriously considering” a run in the upcoming election, during a Friday interview on American Family Radio, Reuters reported.

The special election arose after Jeff Sessions vacated the seat to become President Trump’s attorney general. Moore lost to Jones, a former federal prosecutor, by a small margin. In the Friday interview Moore claimed the seat was stolen by a Democrat-waged disinformation campaign.

“I think that’s been pronounced in the national newspapers — the New York Times, The Washington Post even — has recognized there was a disinformation campaign going on in September of 2017 by forces outside of Alabama that spent a lot of money not regulated by the FEC in trying to dissuade Republicans from voting and encourage and enrage Democrats,” he said to “Focal Point” host Bryan Fische.

The Washington Post reported in January that a slew of misleading online tactics was used in an effort to influence the election. Political analysts did not, however, attribute Moore’s loss to disinformation, pointing instead to a campaign marred by allegations of sexual misconduct.

There’s more at the original.

Sorry, but the fact that Mr Moore admitted to dating teenaged girls when he was in his thirties reminds me of Roman Polanski’s famous statement:

But… f***ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f*** young girls. Juries want to f*** young girls – everyone wants to f*** young girls!

Why, I would have to ask, wouldn’t we think that Mr Moore wanted to f(ornicate) young girls when he has admitted dating young girls? Well, whether Mr Moore did anything illegal or not is pretty much beside the point: enough voters in the Heart of Dixie believed that he was a personal scumbag that Mr Jones won the election.

In the end, that’s all that mattered. I wrote that I would like to see Mr Moore win the election, and then get expelled by the Senate, so that the Governor of Alabama could appoint another Republican to fill the seat.

I would rather see a man who may or may not have tried to f(ornicate) an underaged girl 38 years ago than a man who would f(ornicate) the whole country today sitting in the Senate.

That was a terrible and hypocritical position to have to take, but, as we’ve already seen, Senator Jones in the Senate has been an effort to harm the entire country. We might have hoped that Mr Jones would at least try to take some conservative positions, to try to retain his seat following the 2020 election, but that hasn’t happened. The most obvious example was his vote against the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, but that was hardly the only one.

Mr Moore has every right to seek that Senate seat in the 2020 election, but if he manages to win the Republican nomination he will simply hand that seat back to Senator Jones, and everybody knows it. Seeking that seat is an example of him putting his own benefit above the good of Alabama and the good of the country. If he does run again, I hope that Alabama Republican voters will reject him soundly in the primary.
________________________________________
If you found this article interesting, please visit my Red State story archive.
My personal website, The First Street Journal, includes articles not necessarily in Red State’s paradigm.
You can follow me on Twitter.