Charles Pierce on Roy Moore as Exactly What Republicans Are All About Now: "Wake Up and Smell the White Supremacist Theocracy"

I'd rather have a pedophile in office rather than a democrat any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Pedophiles only screw kids while democrats screw everyone.

— Carroll Bryant (@CarrollBryant) November 10, 2017

This quote should be hung in museums of American history 50 years from now so people can remember why the Republican Party collapsed. https://t.co/P70omazXeD

— Matthew Chapman (@fawfulfan) November 10, 2017

Charles Pierce hits the nail squarely on the head:

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. 

Without fastening itself to the enthusiastic remnants of American apartheid, modern conservatism and the modern Republican party never would have become the juggernaut they became, and the religious right was one of the more enthusiastic of those remnants. Small wonder, then, that so many Good Christian Men are either lining up behind Roy Moore, or if-then’ing themselves into incoherence trying not to talk about him. He has all the right positions on all the right issues that discomfort all the right people, and, given that, these people would vote for Satan himself. 

He is you. He is all of you. Another monster out of the lab.

And then there's Jamelle Bouie:

Republicans face the same choice they did last year, when Trump was accused of sexual assault. And with few exceptions, they have deferred making a choice, which is a choice in and of itself. By hedging their statements, and by not directly calling for Moore to leave the race, they are signaling their willingness to accept Moore into the Senate, if he wins. His predatory behavior, his bigotry, his contempt for the rule of law—all of those are secondary to the fact that he will give them an additional vote. This is where the Republican Party and the conservative movement stand. If partisanship demands that they support an abuser and a predator, then that’s exactly what they'll do.

The slogan of the Grand Old Party now, in a nutshell:

Give me a pedophile or give me death.

— Bill Lindsey (@wdlindsy) November 11, 2017