One of our attorneys is a Jew
Doug Jones, a Democratic former prosecutor who mounted a seemingly quixotic Senate campaign in the face of Republican dominance here, defeated his scandal-scarred opponent, Roy S. Moore, after a brutal campaign marked by accusations of sexual abuse and child molestation against the Republican.
The upset delivered an unimagined victory for Democrats and shaved Republicans’ unstable Senate majority to a single seat.
But better than that, it’s a smack in the face to President Pussygrabber and Steve Wifebeater Bannon.
The abandonment of Mr. Moore by affluent white voters, along with strong support from black voters, proved decisive, allowing Mr. Jones to transcend Alabama’s rigid racial polarization and assemble a winning coalition.
Despite all those closed voting precincts and DMV offices in mostly-black counties.
Bannon helped.
Mr. Moore, instead of facing questions about accusations of sexual abuse, largely vanished from the campaign in the last week. He returned to Alabama for a rally in the rural, southeast corner of the state on Monday with Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist.
But the most memorable comments from the event did not come from Mr. Moore. Rather, they emerged from Mr. Bannon, who mocked the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, a University of Alabama graduate, for not attending a more prestigious school; Mr. Moore’s wife, Kayla, who angrily denied charges the couple was anti-Semitic by noting “one of our attorneys is a Jew;” and an Army friend of the candidate, who recalled the two of them being uneasy walking into a Vietnam brothel to find “pretty girls” whom Mr. Moore found too young.
Happy Hanukkah.
This is the beginning of the END of Trump
Here’s hoping.
Has Trump been silent? I figured he’d be blasting out about illegal voting and fake news…illegal voting meaning, of course, anyone who votes for the “wrong” candidate (I’m sure he’d be happy to explain why you and I are illegal, in spite of being white. Being women could be the starting point for many of these folks).
iknklast, I assume he’s still paralysed by rage.
@3: No, but Julian Assange replied to a Trump tweet saying something along those lines. Yeah, fuck Assange.
I avoided any source of news all evening long. Strange as it seems, my trepidation over a Moore victory was far greater than anything I felt in either the lead up to or aftermath of Trump’s 2016 victory. I felt that Moore’s victory would be the final plot twist that left me to abandon all hope in the country. Making the feeling worse: I had zero doubt that Moore would in fact win.
It was around midnight that I decided I had to face reality. I opened the computer, typed “news.google.com” in the browser, stared at that for about 30 seconds, braced myself (literally), and clicked enter…
I cannot think of anything in the last 10 years of my life that led to such an abrupt emotional turnaround as the news headlines that greeted me.
SAME HERE.
Or not quite but almost. I watched a couple of minutes of cable news early evening and then realized NO DO NOT WANT and resolutely waited a couple of hours. I checked a little too early because they were still saying projected winner and the numbers were still way too close so I still had to sweat for about ten minutes.
But yeah.
I am just glad the end of the semester has had me swimming in so much grading I didn’t even think about the election until this morning. I opened my e-mail, and the good news changed my mood. I’ve been celebrating all day (rather mild celebration, of course, considering I am working a 13 hour day and can only celebrate internally and quietly).
I had band rehearsal. I live in Montgomery, which went pretty strongly for Jones. We had a post-rehearsal dinner, where it was announced that Jones had won. I applauded, I think only one other person applauded. This is why I don’t talk to people a lot at rehearsals.
> The abandonment of Mr. Moore by affluent white voters,
Did they? While I’m sighing with relief over Moore’s dismissal, I’m seeing distressing numbers:
63% of White women voted for Moore. 70% of White men.
80% of White evangelicals voted for Moore, 20% of everyone else.
Still, turnout is the answer. And that’s why the vote-suppression campaign has been so ferocious. And the Stein/Nader ‘your vote doesn’t count’ crowd are still banging their high-chairs.
80% of White evangelicals voted for Moore
Like I said on another post: for all the noise they make about “character”, white evangelicals don’t actually give a flying fuck about it, and never did. It is, and always was, about tribalism and white privilege.
So it seems the key isn’t so much being white as it is being evangelical (though the white still applies, obviously, because there are black evangelicals, and they clearly don’t agree with the dominant paradigm of the white evangelical on politics). There are a lot of people out there trying to convince me that most evangelicals are like Jim Wallis (who, I am afraid, is also homophobic and anti-abortion); he is probably less racist and he does have the desire to help poor people become less poor. I haven’t seen a lot of evidence to show that this Jim Wallis mindset applies to many white evangelicals, and to the extent that it does, homophobia and anti-abortion drive their votes more than any desire to help poor people. This may partially be because they feel being religious to excess is the way to help the poor, but it is also because they don’t really care what the person is like personally if they will vote to illegalize abortion and to put prayer back in the schools (and every other government institution).