STOP ASSUMING THESE PECULIAR ROY MOORE CAMPAIGN MOVES AREN'T HELPING HIM. THEY'RE HELPING HIM. (updated)

So this happened at Roy Moore's campaign rally last night:

... on the eve of Tuesday’s election, his wife Kayla Moore attempted to shoot down one of the lesser known allegations against her husband.

“Fake news would tell you that we don’t care for Jews,” Kayla Moore said....

“One of our attorneys is a Jew,” she continued, pausing for cheers and laughter from the crowd.

“We have very close friends that are Jewish, and rabbis, we also do fellowship with them.”

She's being widely mocked in parts of the country where there are more Jews than there are in Alabama.

This happened at the same campaign rally:

Speaker at Moore event says he accidentally went with Moore to a brothel with child prostitutes

... One of the introductory speakers was Bill Staehle, who said he served with Moore in Vietnam. Staehle told the story of a night he spent with Moore and a third man, who he did not name. According to Staehle it was the third man’s last night in Vietnam and the man invited them to a “private club” in the city to celebrate with “a couple of beers.” ...

Staehle said that, when he and Moore arrived, they soon realized the man had taken them to a brothel...

“There were certainly pretty girls. And they were girls. They were young. Some were very young,” Staehle acknowledged. But according to Staehle, Moore was shocked by what he saw. “We shouldn’t be here, I’m leaving,” Moore said, according to Staehle.

... Staehle and Moore took [the third man's] Jeep and left him there all night with sex workers, who they agreed were underage....

Staehle viewed this story as a triumphant example of Moore’s sterling moral character. Although Staehle hasn’t seen Moore in 45 years, he said, “He’s the same guy....He’s honorable. He’s disciplined. Morally straight. Highly principled.”

And prior to that, there was this:

A pro-Trump group arranged this week to have a 12-year-old girl interview Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, whose special election campaign is entering its final 24 hours.

Millie March went viral at the Conservative Party Action Conference (CPAC) in February, where she offered a full-throttle defense of President Trump’s legislative agenda. Since then, she has become a darling of the right-wing, being interviewed by Fox and Friends in July and meeting Trump himself in September.

As a result, the America First Project — a pro-Trump group founded by former Breitbart writers — decided that Millie would be the best person to interview Moore

Lefties are mocking all this as terrible campaign strategy:

Someone Thought It Would Be A Good Idea To Have Roy Moore Interviewed By A 12-Year-Old Girlhttps://t.co/rtwqPWOwE6

— Jon Cooper (@joncoopertweets) December 11, 2017

But this isn't terrible campaign strategy if you assume that Moore's goal is to fire up hardcore GOP voters.

Moore's Christian, rural base probably finds Jews as exotic as Kayla Moore does, so her assertion about the lawyer probably comes off as not at all tone-deaf. On the other hand, these days most conservative Christians nationwide regard themselves as philo-Semitic -- no, they don't like George Soros, but they have positive feelings about Judaism in the abstract, although those positive feelings tend to involve the notion that Christianity is the fully evolved version of Judaism. (They like the idea of Trump moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem because that will bring us closer to Armageddon.) Beyond that, they know that when Kayla Moore says that she and her husband "also do fellowship with" Jews, that goes way over the heads of us evil secular humanists, who don't even know what it means to "do fellowship." They feel really smug about that.

The base also believes that all the stories about Moore and teenagers are lies, and that Moore is far more moral than the average person. So the brothel story isn't weird to the base -- it's a Christian parable of temptation avoided.

And the interview by the 12-year-old? Same thing -- and it's no surprise to me that this idea was cooked up by former Breitbart staffers. This is no-retreat, no-surrender Bannonism. They want us to howl and send mocking tweets, while the base responds with whataboutist denunciations of our hypocrisy (Harvey Weinstein! Bill Clinton! Ted Kennedy!). Acknowledge no wrongdoing and go on offense. That's the strategy.

And I bet it works. I think Moore will win by 5.

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UPDATE: Good catch from Mark Mucci in comments:

The story about Roy Moore leaving the brothel was in my local paper (NJ Star Ledger) two weeks ago. It's changed slightly. It's just "women" in the older version, now it's "girls" in the brothel. Maybe the storyteller was practicing with my local thinks-he's-a-big-deal conservative columnist.

The story is here. Curious that it evolved in the retelling.