by Rod D. Martin
December 13, 2017

The sun comes up, and today is another day.

So what about Alabama?

On the technical side, our better pollsters underestimated the Democrats’ ability to turn out its voters by about the same margin that Monday’s Fox News poll overestimated it. They met in the middle, and #AbortionJones squeaked out the narrowest of wins. That will make things much harder in the Senate for the next year, and hand a lot more power to the RINOs who hated Roy Moore before the first allegation. Which was always the point, and why a Jeb! Bush operative planted the story with the Washington Post in the first place.

The Enemedia’s narrative has already taken a hard turn this morning from “Roy Moore was an evil pedophile” to “Trump and Bannon failed” and “Republicans will lose the Senate in 2018”. That was always inevitable too. They don’t care about Moore, and for that matter, they know the allegations are false. That was never the point. And just as the 12 women who took down Herman Cain immediately disappeared after they assassinated his character and his campaign, you’ll likely never hear from these women ever again.

But “Trump and Bannon failed” because Democrats and Jeb! acolytes lobbed painfully ridiculous allegations (or even true allegations, though they weren’t) at a candidate in the final weeks? “Republicans will lose other Senate seats” because campaigns that won’t turn on whether Roy Moore committed crimes somehow will? This is the inevitable spin, the latest in a list of means by which the Beltway wants to retake its lost power, but it’s also nonsense. The Arizona and Florida Senate races won’t turn on this any more than the 2017 Virginia governor’s race turned on Donna Brazile’s revelations that Hillary actually stole the 2016 nomination process from Bernie Sanders.

But they’ll say it. Because they hope to weaken the President, they hope to regain power, and just as in McConnell’s deliberate sacrifice of a Senate seat — despite a mere 52-48 majority — to stop someone who ran on a promise to vote for a new Majority Leader, they will be more than willing to gain that power over their own party even if that means losing control of the country to the Democrats.

Pride works like that.

Pride works like that in the church too. A lot of Christian “leaders” were perfectly willing to throw Roy Moore under the bus at the first ludicrous allegation, never mind his spotless, godly 50-year public life beginning at West Point and as a volunteer in Vietnam. Some of them did this out of misplaced principle: they really believed Rahab sinned by lying to protect Joshua, Caleb and the spies; they really believed that we should listen to Potiphar’s wife (after all, why would she lie?).

But some of them found Moore distasteful from the beginning, and saw in the allegations an opportunity to distance themselves, even at the expense of character assassination. And others saw virtue signaling to their audiences as virtue itself, or at least an opportunity to jockey for position in their herd.

A few of them actually argued that it was better for one man to die than for the whole group to perish. Like Caiaphas, though, they neither made a good case for their superficial position, nor fully understood the meaning of their own words.

The church has too many wolves in sheep’s clothing. But it also has too many sheep in shepherd’s clothing.

Will any of this cause us to lose the Senate in 2018? Not likely: it will just be a lot harder to do good and restrain evil in a 51-49 Senate, in which the balance of power lies in the hands of the John McCains and Mitch McConnells who engineered all this for their own gain in the first place, and with a vote given up to #AbortionJones. Moore didn’t lose because “Trump has no coattails” or “Bannon is an idiot” or any of the other trash talk du jour. He lost because of a naked character assassination, aided and abetted by many on his own side, full stop.

The only broader applicability of last night is the emboldening of our enemies that assassination will surely bring. The left has long believed that Christians are stupid, and that they can be stampeded if you just use the word “sex”. Last night proved that case, again, sadly. And Democrats and RINOs alike have figured out that if you have no credible, quality allegations, you can still win by coming up with lots of quantity: get nine people to lie instead of one — even if one of Herman Cain’s accusers was actually David Axelrod’s next-door neighbor — and some people will believe that the sheer number of lies makes them true.

That’s the playbook from now on. Trump was inoculated by having a sordid past: no one expected much of him, and everyone had already internalized that even worse might be true. The real danger in this is to good men, the kind of men who are foolish enough to think that because they’ve lived a good life they’re immune.

No, no friends: good men are precisely who will die in this apocalypse. Because every allegation against them will seem shocking, and many “leaders” on their own side will delight in being publicly shocked.

Aside from the evil just done to one of the finest public servants we have, it’s that which is the most grievous harm of last night. It will get far worse before it gets better, because now we’ve shown that it works: many Christians will instantly abandon godly people if the bare accusation is sufficiently outrageous, and in fact will even pile on. The left in both parties will run that play over, and over, and over again.

The irony, of course, is that some of Judge Moore’s most vicious attackers in the church will most certainly lose their pulpits and their offices in exactly this way. And they will be shocked to learn that by the measure that they judged him, it will be judged back to them too.