NBC News President Donald Trump rallied for for former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore on Friday night. He delivered no push to his candidate in Alabama’s hard-fought U.S. Senate race. Despite carrying a lead into election day in all but one public poll, Moore lost very narrowly.

That Donald Trump. He always gets the last “I told you so” word. Even on himself. After seeing his efforts for the execrable Roy Moore blow up in his face, he claimed today he’d always known Moore couldn’t win a general election. That’s why he had backed appointed incumbent Senator Luther Strange in the Alabama Republican primary that everyone expected to produce the successor to Trump’s unhappy amnesiac-about-Russia Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Except when Strange lost badly to Moore, despite Trump’s strenuous efforts, he’d acted like Strange had always been a loser. What a card.

Needless to say, Doug Jones’s dramatic come-from-behind win over the twice-defrocked Alabama chief justice is a hard-fought, well-earned, tremendous victory. It shows there are some limits, even in the Deep South heart of the neo-Confederacy.

If you have an outstanding candidate, a near perfect campaign, and a bigger African American turnout than emerged in Barack Obama’s runs.

It’s especially satisfying that the racist, anti-empowered women Moore lost by a 99 to 1 ratio among black women. But there is a silver lining for the Creationist champion; he’s got plenty of time to learn how to ride that iconic plantation overseer’s horse of his.

Jones pollster and strategist Paul Maslin, cited here in the LA Times for both his role and his enthusiastic views on elections still to come, told me all along that Jones had an excellent chance of winning. But things had to break right. Which they did.

And it’s a damn good thing they did, even though a Moore victory would have provided its own set of ruthless opportunities. More on that in a moment.

The U.S. Senate is a mere shadow of what it once was. I had the then unwitting privilege of experiencing the last vestiges of its greatness, as a Senate intern. Since then, it’s been decidedly downhill. But as bad as things are, they can almost always get worse.

Roy Moore in the Senate would not just have been worse, it would been an utter travesty. So kudos to Paul Maslin, and old friend and colleague, not to mention a terrific expert on Dylan, the Beatles and the Peak TV of ‘Mad Men’ et al.

Senator Doug Jones, a former U.S. Attorney who prosecuted the Klan murderers of little black girls in a notorious church bombing of the civil rights era, not only prevented the travesty of Senator Moore walking the once hallowed halls, he will likely block a number of future Trump moves. The already closely divided Senate will now stand at 51 Republicans and 49 Democrats.

The significance of the Jones victory will only increase if a few more Republicans who claim to be upset by the ascendance of know-nothing, neo-fascist Trumpism in their party get off their behinds and walk their talk.

Which brings us to the missed opportunity. While the Jones victory provides a great shot of adrenaline, well, more like rocket fuel, to the Democratic Resistance, a Moore victory would have provided a spectacular target, a literal bull’s eye on the Republican Party and its candidates even more glaring than Il Duce Donald himself. The long ago party of Lincoln certainly deserves it.

Because, let’s not forget, notwithstanding his undoubted merits and a great campaign, Doug Jones is going to the U.S. Senate, by a margin of about 20,000 votes, only because there are highly credible charges that Moore is an alarming perv with young girls.

The Republicans were ready to go along with everything else about the guy. And why not, since they have repeatedly demonstrated that they either agree outright or are all too willing to countenance the tremendous number of appallingly reactionary elements in Roy Moore’s public persona.

Moore is one of the foremost champions of “Christian sovereignty,” the evangelical equivalent of sharia law, in which the dictates laid down by a self-selected “elect” channeling their version of God supersedes the actual, democratically-derived laws of humanity.

Moore is strictly anti-choice on abortion and anti-feminist.

He remains a leader in the preposterous anti-Barack Obama “birther” movement claiming that the first black president isn’t really an American. Moore also insists that Obama is a secret Muslim. No wonder Sean Hannity embraced the guy, and shamefully backed off his own demand that Moore demonstrate his innocence on the charge of child molestation.

Moore is pro-Confederacy in his interpretation of the Civil War and a great champion of the notorious statues erected to whitewash the violent opposition to Reconstruction and brutal segregationist system.

He is anti-preschool and pro-home schooling.

He flatly denies the science of evolution and is a champion of Creationism.

He denounces African American protests against police brutality.

He is a hard-core protectionist on trade.

He is anti-union.

He is anti-immigration.

He is wildly anti-LGBT, equating any sexual orientation other than heterosexuality with “bestiality.”

He is an virulent Islamophobe.

Since he is anti-science, he is a climate change denier.

But he is a tremendous admirer of Russian President Vladimir Putin, simply not grasping that the spymaster president pushes a number of positions simply to disrupt the West by attracting usefully disruptive idiots like, well, Moore himself. He claims that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 presidential election. “I think it was the providential hand of God.”

The Republican Party has encouraged and embraced pretty much all this stuff, most of it for a long time. It would have been great fun to have them squirm at the spectacle of a United States Senator who is unabashed in believing that Fred Flintstone, Jesus Christ, and the T. Rex all roamed around together on an Earth that is about 6,000 years old.

Unfortunately, we will not have Roy Moore to kick around every day.

But we will have a fine new U.S. senator, not to mention a president who twists himself into a pretzel in his erratic megalomaniac syndrome of always being “right.”

Facebook comments are closed on this article.