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Alabama Voters Don’t Need Insults
This from John Podhoretz is just one of many similar comments out there:
Similarly, if you believe America has rotted away morally, the idea you’d hand enormous political power to a morally rotted person like Roy Moore reveals your own spiritual and moral rot.
What is wrong with simply saying “I disagree with your decision to vote for Roy Moore?”
Alabama voters are between a rock and a hard place. It’s not entirely their fault since Moore’s peccadilloes weren’t known until it was too late to take him off the ballot. The “establishment” offering, Luther Strange, was scandal-tainted himself.
It is true that Moore’s refusal to step down does not speak well of his character either.
But if you vote for Roy Moore, do you become him? If you vote for Doug Jones, do you become an abortion-promoting leftist?
If character should always trump political considerations, what ‘s the right choice if it were Moore versus a scandal-free Nazi?
Alabama voters have a choice between a predator and a progressive. Please, cut them some slack.
Published in General
I didn’t know who she was so looked it up. She died at age 75. For some reason the newspapers mostly posted photos of her in younger days. I found one taken at age 63, though. Not bad for a 63yo.
Indeed. And that’s where the relativistic and arbitrary cultural standards run smack into biological reality. This is how it could be wrong for a 30 year old to pursue a 16 year old now but not perverted. This is how so many sexual acts could be acceptable now yet remain perverted. Perversion of what? Perversion of “normal” biological truths. Is normal changing? I don’t think so, and yet we’re trying to discard it or “progress” or “evolve” past it to enlightenment instead of harmonizing with it. That’s one reason I love Catholic teaching on sex regardless of faith – it makes a whole lot of sense.
She was 75, seemed to have a cigarette in her hand in half the pictures of her and died of COPD. Cigarettes age people badly.
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah–it’s the siren call of the envious, dateless, beta-male wonders, rationalizing their failures by sour-grapes-ing the prowess and general studliness of the alpha [*****]men.
I always think of the scene from “When Harry Met Sally” when this topic is brought up:
“I asked her where she was when Kennedy was shot. She said ‘Ted Kennedy was shot?'”
Seriously though, one thing that hasn’t really been brought up is that there’s a lot of variance in types and categories of attraction among men. For example, a guy I worked with at a former company, who was in his late 40s, early 50s, really liked young women, even though they were scarcely older than his college-aged daughter. That creeps me out in a way separate from any notion of social disapproval. Some guys like older women.
It must be this one then. That’s just sad. Clearly there are a lot of emotional issues at work. That’s too bad. It looks like she has had a hard time.
That’s the one.
And I purposely picked Christine Keeler because she’s famous for being in a sex scandal that took down a government. She was very pretty, in an early 1960s sort of way.
Did Roy Moore loose because people in Alabamia imagine he’s a pervert ? Did he loose because people believe he really assaulted Beverly Nelson or because they’re horrified the other woman was only fourteen ? Maybe not exactly.
People in Alabama might have been saying to themselves, in so many words: “Moore acted like the essence of gentlemanly restraint and gallantry with teenaged girls whose families could have handed him his head on a platter had he acted any other way. But what about that seventeen year old nobody of a waitress who, obviously, thought highly of him, and thought he genuinely liked and respected her too, and trusted that it was out of generosity and concern that he was offering her a ride home from work? And what about that wild, very troubled girl abandoned by her mother to Moore outside a custody hearing at which (the girl must have felt) her mother intended to get more permanently shed of the job of looking out for her?
This Moore guy speaks with the tongue of men and of angels. But isn’t he still only all about Roy Moore the way he was 38 years ago when he was courting young women it wouldn’t have been prudent to con into sex, and being lewd and intimidating, or trying to con into sex, young women he didn’t see a need to treat honorably or compassionately ? How safe is it to trust Moore has developed some respect for the humanity of other human beings over the past thirty plus years and hand him power ?”
And that is hitting the nail on the head. Yes. It wasn’t that Roy Moore did skeevy things 38 years ago, it was that he was Roy Moore. He wasn’t doing skeevy things these past thirty plus years, but he was still acting like an irresponsible showboater. The fundamentals had not changed.
Oddly enough, I think, more than anything else, it was Beverly Nelson’s public statements that took down Roy Moore. I mean, however pragmatic it might be to do so, who feels motivated to get out and vote for an S.O.B. so heartless he was bullying and deliberately demeaning to an emotionally needy, perhaps not terribly bright, young woman who trusted him and felt honored to have his signature in her high school yearbook, just because she refused to act like a hooker?
Ironic, isn’t it ? Moore, the populist candidate, might have won over enough of the common people to win this election if, thirty or so years ago, when it wouldn’t have looked intentionally self serving, he had been humble and courageous enough to apologize to a young woman working as a lowly waitress at someplace called—like Andrew Jackson— Olde Hickory.
Moore was proud.
Probably
If, in the near future, we find that Alabama now has 670,000 abortion promoting leftists, your theory will have been proven correct.
Podhoretz was lamenting the non-surprising fact that people tend to look at corrupt politicians through a partisan lens, and then accusing a portion of those people of “moral rot.”
He should have realized that thoughtful people were going to the polls on election night, and weren’t going to be happy with their own vote no matter whom they chose.
He should have shown those people more respect.
That was a somewhat tongue in cheek comment. However, if you vote for someone that enables/promotes abortion, then it isn’t a stretch to say you align yourself with those activities or at least don’t care about them.
Re: # 135
To me, it seems to mean people don’t yet care enough about the murder of the unborn to stay focused on ending it. I’m sorry Moore lost.
My response was tongue-in-cheek, too. The original rhetorical question was a response to J.P.’s “moral rot” remark.
I see your point. The bad news is that Alabama will have a Senator that votes opposite of the way most of his constituents would want, on many issues. It’s worse than an empty seat.
I would like to add that had I been in Delaware the year Christine O’Donnell ran for the Senate, I would have voted for her in the general election. I don’t care what (or whom) she has in her cauldron.
What was wrong with her?
I heard weeping and gnashing of teeth because she has personal views concerning sex or contraception and libs were all like “she wants to ban it!”
No, idiots. Only liberals want to ban things they think are wrong. Stop projecting.
After that, if anything else came up, I’m not aware of it. I thought her campaign was over at that point.
The above would probably been enough to make her lose blue Delaware, but then it came out that she practiced witchcraft in college – and that made her campaign even more finished.
I didn’t see anything seriously wrong with her, except not being ready for prime time.
#MajoritiesMatter
I think that some of y’all are being a bit hard on us here in Alabama. Let me set the chronology:
When Jeff Sessions resigned to become the Attornesy General, our then governor, a Republican, appointed Luther Strange, then the Attorney General of Alabama and a Republican, to take his place. At that time, there was a pending investigation by the Attorney General’s office into charges that the governor was dallying with a female member of his staff.
Strange received the appointment and the governor resigned after a plea to a misdemeanor. And a lot of people think that the nomination was tainted as a trade of the Senate seat for leniency. So, Senator Strange started with a black eye.
In anticipation of a special election to fill the balance of Senator Sessions’s term, both parties held primaries on August 15th 2017. Jones won the Democrat primary; there was no winner of a majority (required) in the Republican primary: Moore led with 38% of the vote, Strange followed with 32%, and Brooks came in with 19%. That required a run-off for the Republican nomination.
In the interim, between the primary and the run-off, the television and radio, along with the telephone lines, were saturated with advertisements from both sides, but chiefly from outside groups linked with the Washington Republican establishment soliciting for Strange.
That run-off vote was held on 26 September and Moore, who previously had won two statewide elections, toook 54.6% of the total to Strange’s 45%. To this point, nothing had been said about the business of Moore and the young ladies and Moore had a commanding lead over the Democrat in the polls.
On 9 November, 33 days before the election on 12 December, the Washington Post story appeared and there was a great hue and cry. The Party has no mechanism for relievineg a candidate from his position, although a criminal indictment or conviction might give rise to an effort to do that. So, like Secretery Rumsfseld, we went to war with the candidate we had. The “Sex” troubles threw a spanner into the works of the Moore campaign and a lot of good and faithful Republicans had to make a hard choice. I explained in several threads on Ricochet (e.g., “More Moore”) my own as follows
I and many others with whom I personally acquainted made the same hard choice, and lost. We’ll see what happens. In the meanwhile, please be a little more charitable in measuring us here. After all, we are the same State that gave Senator Sessions 97% of the vote in his last election.
This is excellent. I hope people read your whole comment.