Creep’s foe is justice hero
Dem Klan-buster true law-&-order pol in Alabama
There was a great old tennis promoter named Bill Riordan, who once managed Jimmy Connors and who used to say that you were only in trouble when you started to believe your own material.
That is where we are with so many of these people in Washington, D.C., and why they sometimes act as if they sometimes lie to stay in practice, whether the subject is Roy Moore or a sham of a tax reform bill, or even the way an old busted valise like Rep. John Conyers used to think he could turn his office into a singles bar.
Here was the President tweeting on Sunday morning about Doug Jones, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Alabama, running against an accused pedophile and allaround bum named Roy Moore. Moore, of course, is someone who once viewed dance recitals and custody hearings and the Gadsden, Ala., mall as one huge permissive room.
Here was the President saying that Jones is soft on crime and guns and borders and everything except, well, accused pedophiles and, oh by the way, also a stooge for Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.
As always, you don’t even know where to start as you begin to deconstruct all of this. But one place to start might be with Jones’ successful prosecution, when he was the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, of two Ku Klux Klan members linked to the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that left four African-American children dead.
The facts of that cold case, even in a political world where facts seem to matter less and less, are not just stubborn. They are immutable, in Alabama and everywhere else.
This is from a piece Jones wrote for the Huffington Post back in September, looking back on his prosecution of those KKK members nearly 20 years earlier:
“Sadly, the pattern of violence as a response to hope has reasserted itself. We saw it in the Charleston church massacre in 2015. We saw it on display in Charlottesville this past August. We’ve seen it in the attacks on mosques and synagogues, and against the LGBT community. We see it in the hostility toward the Latino community. We cannot sweep this violence under the rug. We must address the forces that lead to it and prosecute those who perpetrate such acts.”
But he’s the guy in that Senate race who is supposed to be soft on crime. And why are voters of Alabama supposed to believe he is soft on our borders, too? Because he doesn’t support the notion of building a wall between this country and Mexico.
By now even people in outer space know how fixed this President is on that wall. The other day, after the massacre in Egypt, Donald J. Trump was once again tweeting about the need for that wall, and making you wonder how a great big beautiful wall would have protected worshipers in Sutherland Springs, Tex., from being gunned down on a Sunday morning less than a month ago.
Jones is the one who went after church killers, from the KKK and out of Alabama’s past. Jones led the prosecution of a domestic terrorist named Eric Rudolph, the bomber of Centennial Park during the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, for Rudolph’s bombing of the New Woman All Women Health Care Center in Birmingham. If this makes Jones some kind of lousy liberal Democrat, we probably need a few more like him in the Senate.
But the voters of Alabama are told that Jones really is the weak one, not Roy Moore and his own well-documented weakness of the flesh as it pertained to young girls. It is all because the President and his party need all the votes they can get if they are going to shove this tax bill of theirs through the Senate and down our throats.
Say anything, in the belief that you can convince suckers of almost anything. And, who knows, maybe Trump can drag Moore and his phony, sorry self across the finish line, even though Moore belongs in Congress as much as Conyers still does, and even though Conyers at least announced Sunday he is stepping aside from the House Judiciary Committee.
Maybe Moore really can still win on Dec. 12. Maybe Trump can do better with him in Alabama than he did when Luther Strange was his guy in the Republican primary.
But at what cost to decency and honor that we still want to exist apart from ideology and tribalism? At what cost to the state of Alabama and to this country? At what cost in a country where the real crime these days is against the truth, as vulnerable as young girls in Roy Moore’s town once were at the mall?