Saturday Morning Reading

The topic this morning is the Grand Old Pedophile party.  As always, please go to the links for the full articles.

Charles Pierce leads us off:

The fact is that Roy Moore is very much who the Republicans are. He is representative of a fanatical splinter of American Protestantism that has accounted for a great deal of the success enjoyed by modern conservatism and the Republican Party for over four decades, and there always has been dark sin at the heart of that success. 

The rise of what used to be known as “the religious right” did not begin with the legalization of abortion. That’s a nice story that the various Bible-banging charlatans would like you to believe. No, the institutions that would nurture and produce the religious right were the white-only Christian academies and universities that sprang up in the South as part of the massive resistance to desegregation—the churchgoing end of that strategy. The religious right was not born out of opposition to Roe v. Wade. It was born out of opposition to Brown v. Board. 

There was always something wretched in its founding that invariably asserted itself in our politics. Dishonesty and camouflage were its primary sacraments. As part of their bargain with these people, Republicans and conservatives agreed tacitly to overlook these things, and so they became accustomed to overlooking everything until, today, alleged pedophilia of the most grotesque sort is the latest thing to be overlooked in the cause of tax-cuts and the restriction of women's reproductive rights. (our emphasis)

You could easily argue that the roots of this complicity go back many decades more, back through when a resurgent KKK cloaked itself in religious symbolism, through the Jim Crow era, all the way to this country's founding. The party labels changed, but conservatives were always the most culpable.

Speaking of conservatives, we have a few who want the Grand Old Pedophile party to die.

Jennifer Rubin:

If there is a single idea animating Trump’s GOP, it is that “blood and soil” (or race and religion, if you prefer) — not the American creed (“All men are created equal…”) — is the defining feature of the United States. Whatever else that is not white and Christian is foreign, alien and a threat to “real America.” Whether in day-to-day politics, foreign affairs or domestic policies, there is no right and wrong, only them and us. That’s Trumpism in a nutshell. The Republican Party’s inability to immediately and completely separate itself from and denounce Moore is the predictable result of this thinking. 

I would like to think that Americans have gotten a good look at this Frankenstein-esque party and will repudiate it in 2018 and 2020. I still carry the belief (bolstered by Tuesday’s election) that most Americans have not lost their minds and souls.

Rubin wants a new "conservative" party to replace the GOP. A question for her: what would keep that new party from devolving exactly the way the current conservative party devolved, through shameless and dishonest pandering to the worst instincts of those Americans who have come to internalize the bullshit they've been fed for over 40 years?

Rubin's fellow neo- con Max Boot joins the chorus:

This episode is the sorry culmination of two trends that have disfigured the conservative movement beyond all recognition: contempt for the facts and desire to win at all costs. Republicans are increasingly reliant on “alternative facts” manufactured by the likes of Fox News and Breitbart, which claim that global warming isn’t real and neither is the Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee. The real scandal, they tell us, is the Steele dossier paid for by the Democrats in an attempt to uncover Trump’s Russian connections. Or is it the evidence-free claim that Obama supposedly wiretapped Trump?  

In the final analysis, no indictment of their candidate will convince the faithful. As Trump once said, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Or, more to the point, Roy Moore could molest a 14-year-old girl and not lose votes. Because for Republican partisans, their opponents are “the forces of evil,” and anything is preferable to that. Even Donald Trump. Even Roy Moore. So in ostensibly fighting evil, Republicans have become complicit in it. 

This is a party that does not deserve to survive.

While, again, we would heartily agree with this conclusion, we doubt that American politics would be without a right- wing party of hypocrites, bigots and nihilists for very long.