“The job before democracy is to get rid of such canaille; if it fails, they will devour it.”
H.L. Mencken
Well.
Scarcely more than a year ago, I pointed toward a sort of bright side arising out of Donald Trump’s election: The Evangelical Right would crash and burn.
Third, 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump, and that will eventually sink into public consciousness, as in, Wait a minute! What are you saying? The church people gave us that piece of sh*t p***y-grabber?! Yep, they did — and that will be the tale of how the Evangelical Right and ‘movement so-called conservatism’ committed political suicide. They might make some noise, occasionally score a small victory — but they are done. The Trump administration, with its inevitable serial indecencies and corruptions, is their achievement, and they will never live it down.
Now that ‘evangelical’ is practically a dirty-word and Franklin Graham and Robert Jeffress and Jerry Falwell, Jr., are figures of (overdue) public ridicule …. permit me a moment of schadenfreude. I’ve earned it.
“The free exercise clause of the constitution does not apply to any religion but Christianity.”
Roy Moore
We know what you are now, evangelicals — and you’re finished. For years you have preened about your ‘family values’ — and you broke for Trump with record-setting numbers. You prattle about love-love-love — and you back men who are egregious racists, xenophobes, and amoral horndogs. You can barely open your mouths without lying, and in Roy Moore you’re backing a theocratic loony who is, in fact, deeply hostile to the Enlightenment ideals that undergird America’s founding.
We know who you are, evangelicals: You are the screwed-up people who actually are as sick and decadent as Christianity says everybody is; your bullshit theology is nothing but projection.
The polls range all over the place. A FOX News poll shows Jones ahead by 10-points, and another set of polls sampled at the same time puts Moore ahead by 3-points. The bottom-line, probably, is that it’s too close to call.
I have a simple rule that I invoke whenever a political issue is in doubt, and I can count on one hand the number of times it has gone wrong: Never go long against the common sense and decency of the American people. Trump and Moore are w-a-a-a-y long, ambulatory affronts to common sense and ordinary decency, and it’s time for a market correction — so I’m calling tomorrow’s contest for Jones, by a nose. Yes, it’s Alabama, and you can hardly go out-of-doors without tripping over some idiot Baptist trying to jam a tract in your hand, and Moore got re-elected to the state Supreme Court after removal for egregious misconduct that should have doomed him to obscurity. Those things count strongly in his favor; he has a devoted base, and they will turn out tomorrow.
But so will the sane, decent-minded grown-ups, and they’re not going to stand for further humiliation at the hands of this pack of clowns.