(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)

I awoke this morning to the plaintive scream of a delicate desert dweller who apparently had been in a coma in the middle of a landfill and just now had awakened and noticed the smell. Tweeted Jeff Flake, soon-to-be ex-senator from Arizona:

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Come on, Republicans. Is this who we are? This cannot be who we are. https://t.co/Fp0xnwOdqz — Jeff Flake (@JeffFlake) November 10, 2017

The fact is that Roy Moore is very much who the Republicans are. He is representative of a fanatical splinter of American Protestantism that has accounted for a great deal of the success enjoyed by modern conservatism and the Republican Party for over four decades, and there always has been dark sin at the heart of that success.

The rise of what used to be known as “the religious right” did not begin with the legalization of abortion. That’s a nice story that the various Bible-banging charlatans would like you to believe. No, the institutions that would nurture and produce the religious right were the white-only Christian academies and universities that sprang up in the South as part of the massive resistance to desegregation—the churchgoing end of that strategy. The religious right was not born out of opposition to Roe v. Wade. It was born out of opposition to Brown v. Board.

Jerry Falwell Getty Images

There was always something wretched in its founding that invariably asserted itself in our politics. Dishonesty and camouflage were its primary sacraments. As part of their bargain with these people, Republicans and conservatives agreed tacitly to overlook these things, and so they became accustomed to overlooking everything until, today, alleged pedophilia of the most grotesque sort is the latest thing to be overlooked in the cause of tax-cuts and the restriction of women's reproductive rights.

Without fastening itself to the enthusiastic remnants of American apartheid, modern conservatism and the modern Republican party never would have become the juggernaut they became, and the religious right was one of the more enthusiastic of those remnants. Small wonder, then, that so many Good Christian Men are either lining up behind Roy Moore, or if-then’ing themselves into incoherence trying not to talk about him. He has all the right positions on all the right issues that discomfort all the right people, and, given that, these people would vote for Satan himself.

He is you. He is all of you. Another monster out of the lab.

One of the things that’s still happening while it appears everything else is falling apart is that the Republicans are still stuffing the federal bench to bursting with larval Scalias and other distressing fauna. Take, for example, one Brett Talley, a 36-year old who was just endorsed by the Senate Judiciary Committee, on a party-line vote, for a lifetime position on the federal bench despite the fact that brother Talley has never tried a case in his life, and despite the fact that he is a…blogger. Good God. From the L.A. Times:

Brett J. Talley, President Trump’s nominee to be a federal judge…has never tried a case, was unanimously rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Assn.’s judicial rating committee, has practiced law for only three years and, as a blogger last year, displayed a degree of partisanship unusual for a judicial nominee, denouncing “Hillary Rotten Clinton” and pledging support for the National Rifle Assn.

And where, if he is confirmed, will the remarkably lucky young Mr. Talley be hanging his robe?

Alabama.

Res Ipse loquitur, y’all.

Getty Images

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Slavic Soul Party” (Opa Cupa): Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here, from 1937, is a million-ton landslide in Los Angeles. “The driver miraculously escaped!” Any resemblance between this film and the Virginia House of Delegates is purely coincidental.

I’m about a quarter of the way into Noah Feldman’s , and I’m having a grand old time of it. Feldman is a very accessible and quietly stylish writer, and his approach to his subject is a fresh one. The chapter on Madison’s commitment to the disestablishment of religion is particularly insightful, and you really feel for the little guy when Kitty Floyd shuts him down.



Is it a good week for dinosaur news, Utah Public Radio? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

"We fairly quickly realized that this thing was a mired sauropod, a long neck dinosaur that had gotten stuck in the mud, so that the hind leg and one of the forelegs was sticking down, vertically, into the mud below the rest of the skeleton. So this poor animal had been stuck in the mud. You hate to imagine how long it took to actually die, unless it was lucky and some meat-eating dinosaur came and put it out of its misery.” When he started to collaborate with Spanish and British colleagues, they realized that wasn’t the only unique thing about it. “I brought Rafael Royo-Torres in as a collaborator, and he recognized that this was part of a group of dinosaurs that had never been seen in North America before.” Kirkland says the group is called Turiasaurus, which Royo-Torres had discovered and named about a decade ago. The group is native to Europe.

Turista turiasaurs! Open borders! It is quite a thing to contemplate that our part of the continent was more open to immigration 140 million years ago than it is today.

The Committee took last week off because they are lazy bastids who do not work hard unless you beat them over the head with ripe flounders. We got them back in harness this week by threatening to turn them over to Top Commenter Judy Clay, who was quick to notice their dereliction of duty. Anyway, The Committee went for simplicity this week, and Top Commenter Mary Beth Hilburn hit them right in the sweet spot when she noticed that a picture of Roy Moore on horseback had been chosen to adorn the post dealing with his nasty gymnastiness.

May I suggest a caption for the picture above? "And the horse, he rode in on."

Why, yes, you may. And here are 81.22 Beckhams in payment for your services. Nice comma, too.

I’ll be back on Monday with what likely will be some very rich “If, then” gobshitery from the Party of Moore. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, or we’re checking the papers of your dinosaur ancestors.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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