image credit: sol1776.blogspot.com
Mark Steyn is a favorite of mine, and here are a few of his
post-election thoughts:
[Judge Roy] Moore lost narrowly enough
to suggest that it wasn't the accusations that did him in. He could have
survived those, just about. What killed him was that he was running against
both the Democrats and the Republicans - including Alabama's own senior senator,
Richard Shelby. (Trump post-Billy Bush was in a similar position, as the likes
of Paul Ryan, Kelly Ayotte, etc, stampeded to distance themselves.) But Roy
Moore was the nominee only because the smart guys over-invested in Luther
Strange (just as in 2015 they over-invested in Jeb Bush). In the first round of
primary voting, Mitch McConnell's priority was to prop up Strange by taking out
what he regarded as his principal threat, Mo Brooks. Congressman Brooks would
have made an excellent senator, and would have been elected in a walk, and he
can also claim more plausibly than Moore to be a populist conservative aligned
with the Trump agenda. But McConnell didn't want him in the Senate and, as he
saw it, once Brooks was gone, Luther Strange would have no trouble walloping
Moore in the run-off.
Unfortunately, Strange owed his eminence in Alabama to the
patronage of a corrupt and discredited governor. As I wrote three months ago,
given the disposition of GOP primary electorates in the Age of Trump, they were
unlikely to turn to "a creature from the Alabama swamp ...to drain the
Washington swamp". So, thanks to McConnell and the ten million
bucks he blew through, Moore won the run-off and became the candidate. And
thus, of all preposterous outcomes, Alabama is now a blue state.
. . .
A final thought on Moore:
Yes, he's a kook, and an insufficiently nimble one to dodge the incoming
schoolgirls. But as I wrote three months ago:
Whatever one feels about
Roy Moore, he's principled enough to be willing to lose his job over the Ten
Commandments and same-sex marriage. That's unusual in American politics.
Read Steyn’s full column here. I think he is correct to place blame on Mitch McConnell
and the GOPe Uniparty.
#
# #
