A couple of days ago I mentioned the GOP primary for the special election to fill Jeff Sessions old Senate seat, which happened last Tuesday. No one crossed the 50% rubicon, so the top two finishers, former Chief Justice Roy Moore (he who can’t seem to disentangle his religious inclinations from his civil obligations) and current seat holder by appointment Luther Strange (whose accession to the seat is full of red flags – see this post) will move to a runoff to win the right to face – and probably defeat – the Democratic candidate, former U.S. attorney Doug Jones.
But what surprised me was this mention, via AL.com, in the post-election reporting on US Representative Mo Brooks, who came in third in the GOP primary. This is a Republican candidate, mind you, in a party-segregated primary:
But Strange and McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund [SLF] flooded the state for weeks with attack ads against Brooks – suggesting that he was more closely aligned with top House Democrat Nancy Pelosi.
“Nancy Pelosi and I are not best friends,” Brooks said as the audience laughed. “If you don’t take my word for it, ask Nancy Peolosi.”
Brooks also said that, contrary to another SLF ad, “I do not support the Islamic state.”
First of all, you might as well call it eating your own young when you accuse a candidate of your own Party of the moral equivalent to treason. This for a Representative whose “Trump Score,” which FiveThirtyEight defines as the percentage of votes an elected official’s votes coincides with the result desired by Trump, is 92.5% as of this writing. It is mendacity of a startling order. It’s just about as surprising as attempting to RINO Speaker Ryan out of the party.
Secondly, I have to wonder just how ignorant the Alabama voters have become. To really think someone like Mo Brooks supports the Islamic State requires a level of ignorance about the world and about the Republicans that is more than a little hard to believe. Of course, this type of ad is a choice by the SLF – perhaps they only perceive Alabama to be full of ignoramuses.
It’s a bit of a gob-smack.
But if you consider the atrocity that Fox News has committed on its viewers, it actually makes sense. Fox News viewers, carefully manipulated to only know what Fox News wants them to know, must be wooed in a different manner than well-informed viewers. Perhaps this is the style. Throw even a Party loyalist under the truck when they are not the favored candidate – you have to wonder if there’ll be damage to Brooks in the next House election.
Or is it just that the GOP is now full of attack weasels?
