Moore vs. Strange Debate

U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore debates Sen. Luther Strange Thursday, Sept. 21, 2017, before the Republican runoff election in Montgomery, Ala. (Julie Bennett/jbennett@al.com)

(Julie Bennett)

I used to believe that all political scandals followed the pattern of my stepbrother's flat tire. I've used that story before to explain other trickles that have turned into floods.

When he was sixteen, my older stepbrother had a job bagging groceries after school, and he'd take my stepmother's car there and back home each night.

Until ...

One evening, he shows up on our porch out in the country. The rain was pouring and he was covered in mud. When my stepmother asked what happened, he said ...

"I had a flat tire."

That's OK, my stepmother said. We can change a flat tire.

So they got our family's old spare truck (which I'd later wreck, but that's another story) and drove to where he had left the car. They get a little ways down the road, and he said ...

"It's kind of off in a ditch a little bit."

That's OK, my stepmother said. If we can't get it out, we can get the tractor and pull it out.

The go a little further ...

"It's sort of dented a little."

The truth was my stepbrother had lost control of the car in the rain on a winding road, fishtailed, spun out, gone off the road, hit an embankment, and totaled the car.

And somewhere in all of that, he'd had a flat tire.

I've seen many flat tires. HealthSouth's accounting fraud began with a flat tire. Jefferson County's record-setting municipal bankruptcy began with a flat tire. Robert Bentley's political self-destruction began with a flat tire.

But the closer we get to seeing the wreck with our own eyes, the truth begins to come out.

Or that's the way, I thought these things worked. Now our politicians seem to be following a new game plan, one that defies credibility and common sense, but seems to be working, anyway.

Let's call it the Reverse Flat Tire.

On Nov. 9, the Washington Post first published the accounts of four accusers who said they had encounters with Moore. The most serious of those accusations came from Leigh Corfman, who had been 14 years old when, she said, Moore tried to seduce her. The three others, including Debbie Wesson Gibson and Gloria Thacker Deason, said they had dated Moore when they were teenagers still in high school and he was a deputy district attorney in his early 30s.

A day after that report, Moore went on Sean Hannity's radio show, where he said he knew Gibson and Deason but couldn't remember going on dates with them.

"I don't remember going out on dates," he said of Gibson. "I knew her as a friend. If we did go out on dates, then we did."

At the time it sounded like Moore had admitted to having a flat tire, but since then, he's ...

Well, he's changed his story. In two campaign stops last week, both at churches, Moore told a very different story. He didn't say he didn't remember dating any of the women. Now he denied even knowing them.

"Let me state once again: I do not know any of these women, did not date any of these women and have not engaged in any sexual misconduct with anyone," he said.

Now Gibson, like another of his accusers, has come forward with a high school memento that appears to prove that they not only knew each other but that they dated.

But forget all that for a moment. Set aside whether their accounts are true or false and let's focus, instead, on his.

He's told two stories -- mutually exclusive accounts. Only one can be true. As the old saw goes, is he lying now or was he lying then?

The evidence Gibson has brought forward seems to prove the former.

Not only has Roy Moore lied, but he's lied from a pulpit in a house of God.

Two of them, actually.

It might be a new kind of lying, but it's still lying.

And no matter whether, as his apologists have suggested, there's nothing wrong with a 30-something-year-old man creeping on a bunch of teenage girls, there is something wrong with bearing false witness. It's a sin, even.

Moore first became famous in this state for trying to install the Ten Commandments in state courthouses.

But it's clear today he never put them in his heart.

Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group. You can follow his work on Facebook through Reckon by AL.com.