Plenty of political hypocrisy

What is being lost asRepublicans— the number dwindling every day — defend Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore from allegations of sexually assaulting teen-age girls?

There is a cost to defending Moore. Don’t kid yourselves that there is no cost to it.

And something is lost. So what is it? With a corrupt establishment political center collapsing of its own rotten weight and the left pulling one way and the right pulling another — it seems that politics is everything to us now.

Yes, we have our tribes, our rhetorical weaponry and our mantras that we tweet at each other, again and again .... But politics isn’t everything.

For the record, I believe the women who have accused Moore. And I think it would be best for the nation, for the United States Senate and the state of Alabama if Roy Moore just walked away and disappeared somewhere.

But as long as he fights this, even as more women come out with their accounts of what happened years ago and reports surface about how Moore, in his 30s, trolled shopping malls for teen-age girls, there is the temptation for some in the GOP to defend him.

Unfortunately, that means casting doubt on the memories and the pain of the women giving their accounts of what happened when they were girls, some as young as 14 and 16, when Moore allegedly put his hands on them. …

Many of those still defending him, from Moore die-hards in Alabama to those in the Breitbart sphere, can’t stand the Democratic Washington political establishment and they detest, perhaps even more so, the Republican establishment. I understand their concerns. They see giving any credence to the stories about Moore as capitulation to their enemies.

But that is politics. The one thing we don’t lose in all of this is our vast reserves of political hypocrisy. American politics is incapable of running a hypocrisy deficit.

— Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass, writing Tuesday.