Turnabout is fair play. Moore spent the primary insisting that he was the Trump candidate in the race, never mind POTUS’s endorsement of Luther Strange. Now here’s Democrat Doug Jones claiming that he’s the Trump candidate in the race — the Ivanka Trump candidate, per what she said about Moore a few days ago. He tosses anti-Moore quotes from Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby in there too, all part of Jones’s plan to peel off enough disgusted Republicans from Moore to squeak through to victory. Watch the second clip below for another entry in that genre.

Question: Should a man who supports abortion up to the point of birth be lecturing anyone on child abusers belonging in hell? Jones was asked about that a few weeks ago and retreated.

“Those comments, everybody wants to attack you so they are going to make out on those comments what they want to their political advantage,” Jones said. “To be clear, I fully support a woman’s freedom to choose to what happens to her own body. That is an intensely, intensely personal decision that only she, in consultation with her god, her doctor, her partner or family, that’s her choice. “Having said that, the law for decades has been that late-term procedures are generally restricted except in the case of medical necessity. That’s what I support. I don’t see any changes in that. It is a personal decision.”

So now he’s against late-term abortion, right at the moment that he has a realistic chance of winning Republican crossover votes? Go figure. As for Moore, he’s benefited lately from the media’s “pervnado” coverage sweeping up Al Franken, Charlie Rose, and John Conyers, driving public attention away from his own accusers. The NYT had some interesting reminiscences about him in a story this past weekend, though:

“It was a known fact: Roy Moore liked young girls,” said Faye Gary, a retired Gadsden police officer. “It was treated like a joke. That’s just the way it was.”… Janet Reeves, 57, a former employee of a photo kiosk and an Orange Julius at the mall, talked of Mr. Moore asking a friend of hers, who she recalled was 17 or 18, for her phone number. “I just thought he was the creepy old guy,” she said. Glenn Day, 64, who managed two stores at the mall in those years, recalled that Mr. Moore had such reputation for approaching young women that the mall guard asked him to let security know whenever he saw Mr. Moore there. “I can’t believe there’s such an outcry now,” Mr. Day said, “about something everybody knew.”

Another ex-cop who worked security at the mall said he doesn’t remember anyone ever complaining about Moore. Hmmm. Meanwhile, Kyle Whitmire of AL.com noticed something that people on Twitter have been whispering about, that Moore’s wife Kayla was actually a high-school classmate of Beverly Young Nelson, the woman who claimed Moore assaulted her in his car when she was 16. That raised the question of when exactly Moore first took a romantic interest in his wife. Whitmire:

First, read his book. In it, Moore describes how he met his wife at a Christmas party hosted by friends. He would have been 37. She was 23. “Many years before, I had attended a dance recital at Gadsden State Junior College,” Moore wrote. “I remembered one of the special dances performed by a young woman whose first and last names began with the letter ‘K.’ It was something I had never forgotten. Could that young woman have been Kayla Kisor?”… In an interview Moore gave earlier this year, he gave a similar account, but for one detail. “It was, oh gosh, eight years later, or something, I met her,” Moore said. “And when she told me her name, I remembered ‘K. K.,’ and I said, ‘Haven’t I met you before?'”

Kayla Moore would have been 15 or 16 at the time of the dance recital and Moore would have been around 30, and she stuck in his mind. What was he doing at the dance recital anyway?

There have been no polls of the race this week but it’ll be fascinating to see how things look after the holiday, when Alabamans have had time to digest all of the accusations and contextualize. A Twitter pal made an interesting point this morning, that the volume of sexual misconduct allegations lately against so many prominent men in so many fields may have the perverse effect of diluting the public’s outrage at any single malefactor. If everyone’s a creep, then creepy behavior isn’t aberrant. And if it isn’t aberrant, why should someone be denied elected office because of it?

Exit quotation from an Alabama pastor who’s backing Moore: “There ought to be a statute of limitations on this stuff. How these gals came up with this, I don’t know. They must have had some sweet dreams somewhere down the line. Plus, there are some 14-year-olds, who, the way they look, could pass for 20.”



