Moore found guilty by public opinion
If you were to be accused of unlawful, salacious behavior at an earlier time in your life and knew the allegations had no merit, how many friends and associates could you count on to summarily reject them as unthinkable?
How many of them would stand beside you if it appeared you were standing alone?
Or might they all wash their hands of you like a Pontius
Pilate, fearful of further inflaming that voracious mob demanding your head on a platter?
That’s where Alabama Judge Roy Moore, a Republican and a self-professed evangelical Christian, finds himself this morning, and you don’t have to have a smidgeon of respect for the man to be nevertheless moved by his plight.
Maybe he did once abuse a minor. If so, he’d be loathed here.
But suppose he didn’t? Suppose these 40-year-old accusations, suddenly emerging in the home stretch of a critical senatorial campaign after decades of dormancy, are inaccurate or untrue?
Moore is being pilloried for insisting they’re the handiwork of subversive left-wing operatives.
But isn’t that exactly what Hillary Clinton declared on NBC’s “Today Show” when her husband’s affair with Monica Lewinsky erupted?
“The great story here,” she defiantly insisted, “is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.”
That was before Monica produced her stained blue dress.
Now others are emerging to accuse Moore of similar improprieties, prompting even GOP heavyweights like Mitt Romney, John McCain and Mitch McConnell — “I believe the women!” — to call for the judge’s departure.
Did these empty suits all skip civics class?
Surely they must remember guilt is determined in our courts, not on our streets.
Playing to the crowd has never been what real leadership is about, but real leaders are hard to find today.
Where are those men and women of either party whose beliefs are not negotiable, whose values are not conditional, and whose paths are ordered by their principles, not their politics?
When other women — Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers — gave credence to Lewinsky’s story, the repugnant James Carville, speaking for Clinton, pooh-poohed them all, suggesting, “Drag a $100 bill through a trailer park and there’s no telling what you’ll find.”
How scurrilous that was, and yet it didn’t seem to bother Hillary or the Clinton crowd a bit.
Imagine if Moore said something like that.
Make no mistake, the Roy Moore story is about a lot more than the judge himself.
It’s about what’s happening to America.