Thursday, November 09, 2017

RIGHT-WINGERS WILL DEFEND ROY MOORE AND CLAIM THAT PREDATOR-HATING LIBERALS ARE THE TRUE CODDLERS

Wow:
Leigh Corfman says she was 14 years old when an older man approached her outside a courtroom in Etowah County, Ala. She was sitting on a wooden bench with her mother, they both recall, when the man introduced himself as Roy Moore.

It was early 1979 and Moore — now the Republican nominee in Alabama for a U.S. Senate seat — was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney. He struck up a conversation, Corfman and her mother say, and offered to watch the girl while her mother went inside for a child custody hearing....

Alone with Corfman, Moore chatted with her and asked for her phone number, she says. Days later, she says, he picked her up around the corner from her house in Gadsden, drove her about 30 minutes to his home in the woods, told her how pretty she was and kissed her. On a second visit, she says, he took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes. He touched her over her bra and underpants, she says, and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear.
That's from The Washington Post, which got confirmations of this from friends of Corfman (who says she regularly votes Republican and voted for Donald Trump in 2016). The Post also recounts the stories of three other women who say Moore pursued them when they were teenagers and he was in his thirties.

So far, Moore is hanging tough -- even before the Post story appeared, he cooperated with Breitbart on its version of the story, which leads with his denials (“This garbage is the very definition of fake news and intentional defamation”) and ends with, um, George Soros:
The Post is owned by Nash Holdings LLC, a holding company for billionaire Amazon founder and open borders champion Jeffrey Bezos.

The newspaper formally endorsed Moore’s Democratic opponent Doug Jones in the senate race.

In a series of articles, Breitbart News has documented Jones’s close associations with far-left groups financed by George Soros that push open borders and a host of radical causes.
I'm guessing that more women will come forward and charge that Moore pursued them as teenagers. I imagine Moore will deny those allegations as well. It's quite possible that none of this will stick to him, that he'll be widely defended in the right-wing media, and that he'll still win his election in December.

This should be awkward for conservatives, because they've tried to portray the recent wave of sexual predation stories as a massive liberal scandal. Even though Hollywood and media predators have been exposed exclusively by non-conservative journalists, and even though the predators have been made extremely unwelcome after their exposure, the party line on the right has been that liberals have coddled sex criminals. Here was Milo Yiannopoulos last week, in a column (his first and last) for the Daily Caller, arguing that Kevin Spacey was being treated with kid gloves by the "liberal media":
... consider how differently the media treats the sins of left-wing celebrities.

ABC News’s original summary of the allegations against Spacey was that the actor had “come out” in an “emotional tweet.” In other words, Spacey was blithely excused for something he did, because he’s gay and left-wing. I, on the other hand, was viciously attacked for speaking about something that happened to me, because I’m gay and right-wing. Identity politics has always made exceptions for wrong-thinkers.
Hey, Milo, the Caller hired you, if briefly, even after you defended pedophilia. Your defense of pedophilia didn't prevent right-wing readers from putting your book on the bestseller list. By contrast, Spacey is so toxic right now that he's being deleted from a movie he just filmed, after he lost his TV series, his agent, and his publicist.

Spacey, Harvey Weinstein, James Toback, Leon Wieseltier, Michael Oreskes, and other predators might have been shielded for years, but there's too much public outrage for them to be shielded anymore. But Donald Trump soldiers on, Bill O'Reilly still sells books as he looks for a TV comeback, and I'm guessing that Moore will survive this story as well. Yet on the right, this will still be seen as a liberal problem first and foremost, while conservatives tell themselves that their values are solid.

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