As predicted, Alabama voters chose the anti-American godbotherer rather than the probably-a-crook in the Republican Senate primary. That means Roy Moore, aka "yes, that Roy Moore," will be the party's official nominee to represent Alabama anti-American godbotherers in the United States Senate.
To be clear, Moore is manifestly unfit. It's not even close. He not only believes there are "some communities under Sharia law"—he posits such things happen "up in Illinois"—but is a die-hard believer in the Obama is a secret Kenyan theory, wrote publicly to demand that Rep. Keith Ellison, who is Muslim, be barred from Congress for being Muslim, and most recently was booted from power for ordering Alabama government officials to ignore a United States Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage because Roy Moore sez Jesus thinks otherwise.
So how are Republican leaders reacting to a man willing to violate U.S. laws in service of his theocratic beliefs? Did you have to ask?
"I would like to congratulate Roy Moore on his victory in Alabama tonight. [...] Senate Republicans will be as committed to keeping Alabama's Senate seat in Republican hands with Roy Moore as we were with Luther Strange. I urge all of our friends who were active in the primary to redouble their efforts in the general election.
That is the statement of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who spent months backing anyone who was not the execrable Roy Moore but who flipped within hours of Moore's victory to a supporter and vowing that his party would push the candidacy of the grotesque anti-Constitution theocrat rather than stomach a Democrat, any Democrat, in the same office. National Republican Senatorial Committee head Sen. Cory Gardner obliged with a similar statement.
As for the transparent unfitness of Roy Moore, a man who "made his belief in the supremacy of a Christian God over the Constitution the central rallying point of his campaign", the party has clammed up. The party that burbled outrage for days about whether kneeling during a recorded song was too disrespectful to the nation to be willfully tolerated now has not a damn thing to say about a man who openly believes the Constitution itself is secondary to a particular sect of Christianity, namely his own sect and no others.
[Reporter Alisyn Camerota]: "You know he said lots of controversial things, that President Obama is a Muslim, 10 Commandments need to be in the statehouse. What do you think of those two things?"
[Republican Sen. Ron Johnson: "Well Alisyn, no two people agree 100% of the time. Not by a longshot. [...] I am looking forward to meeting him and hoping we can work together [...]
Asked whether he agreed with Moore on the need for the United States to outlaw homosexuality, among his other stances, Sen. John Hoeven only opined that he hadn't "had a chance to look through all those things." Because, apparently, that is something Sen. John Hoeven needs to check with his staff on. "Let's give him a chance," Hoeven would only say.
New York Rep. Tom Reed was asked if he was "rattled" by Roy Moore's stated belief that 9/11 was God's punishment for America's "perverseness,” and had little to say. "I'll let him answer that question," he meekly offered up. Apparently whether God Himself worked with Al Qaeda to murder thousands of Americans as warning against homosexuality is, in Tom Reed's mind, a negotiable argument so long as Moore and Jesus both want the same tax cuts he does.
Not a single pundit, dimwitted or otherwise, should be piping up in the future with any theory that this set of troglodytes has any love of country that cannot be trampled by even the smallest opportunity to retain or expand their own power. It does not exist. There is no Republican, apparently, whose commitment to religious liberty extends to any American citizen of any background other than their own, and even then such thoughts will only hold if nobody offers them five dollars or a better parking space to betray them three hours later. Roy Moore is the very definition of a man unfit for office; he has twice lost his office for committing offenses against the Constitution itself.
But each Republican toady looks forward to working with him—as they looked forward to obliging the petty bigotries and open corruption of Donald J. Trump—so long as there is possibility of alliance between themselves and those incompetents, and bigots, and zealots, and those that believe we burn the Bill of Rights down to its rubblestone foundation so that those people can be kept in their proper and subservient place.
Roy Moore is the party. Donald Trump is the party. Pay not the slightest damn bit of attention to what the party elders or party pundits blabber on about when the microphones are held to their faces. There has not been a principle yet that those cowards have stood behind once a stiff breeze pushed in the opposite direction; there has not been a crook in America that they each would not rally behind, if rejecting them would cost them the slightest bit of party power.