Meanwhile Breitbart ‘Fake’ News Millionaire Steve Bannon Joins Roy Moore at Tea Party Rally in Fairhope –

Editor’s Note: We wanted to present both of these events with seven days to go in the campaign side-by-side, just in case there are readers out there who are still undecided and want to compare and contrast these campiagns in one convenient place. See what is being said. Decide for yourselves. We welcome your comments below.

Former judge Roy Moore speaks at Oak Hollow Farm in Fairhope with his wife Kayla beside the stage with one week to go in U.S Senate race in Alabma, Dec. 5, 2017: Photo by Glynn Wilson

ELECTION ANALYSIS –

FAIRHOPE, Ala. — With one week to go before election day Dec. 12 in the important race for U.S. Senate between Doug Jones and Roy Moore, Jones took to the stage in Birmingham and questioned Moore’s character. In Fairhope, Moore was joined on the stage by Steve Bannon of Breitbart ‘Fake’ News, the controversial former adviser to Donald Trump, where what’s left of the tea party crowd in Baldwin County came looking for a fight with the “liberal” media and the Republican establishment in Washington.

It was a bizarre scene with words being so twisted around that it was hard to grasp the point of the crowd’s excitement and disgruntlement at the same time (more on that later).

In Birmingham, Jones tried to make the case that deep down, the people of Alabama have more in common than they know in a political climate that has become so divisive there is often no common ground even on basic needs and priorities like education, health care, the economy and the environment.

His campaign billed it as “a major speech” a week before Election Day, and Jones implored Alabama voters to look beyond political party and make the election a referendum on Roy Moore’s character.

“Despite what you hear in his TV ads, Roy Moore has never, ever served our state with honor,” Jones charged. “He has never been a source of pride for the people of this state, only a source of embarrassment.”

Jones seems convinced that “the next Senator from Alabama can impact the arc of our state in an amazing way. He is calling this “a season of opportunity — an opportunity to come together, to realize an Alabama that will make us all proud.”

“Alabama is at a crossroads and it is more important than ever that we rise to meet the challenges both in our great state and across our nation. But we can only do it together, not divided, and with a measure of civility that has been absent from our political discussions,” he said. “I want to go to Washington to address the issues that every day Alabamians are facing and to fix the institutions that are vital to our health and economy.”

He called it “kitchen table issues” and by that he says he means “challenges that we deal with each and every day. Finding a good paying job, making sure our kids and grandchildren are getting the best education possible, and knowing when we are sick, or our family members get sick, that we will have the best health care and that we can pay for medicine.”

Moore Bad for Business

Economic development is a key issue, and as we have reported before, pro-business Republicans are refusing to support Moore. They say he will be “bad for business.”

Alabama is in competition for a $1.6 billion Toyota-Mazda manufacturing plant, which could bring 4,000 jobs to the state. When Toyota is trying to decide whether to expand their operation here, they will want to know what the state is doing to build a workforce that can operate their facilities, Jones said.

“But a serious question that you have to ask yourself is this,” Jones says. “Does the idea of Senator Roy Moore make it more or less likely that Toyota or anyone else would see Alabama’s image in such a negative way that they would cross Alabama off their list and move on to another state?”

“Roy Moore in the United States Senate would be bad for business in Alabama, bad for the economy, and bad for our country,” Jones said, emphatically.

Sex Scandals

Jones talked about the sex scandals that have marred the reputation of Alabama, from former Gov. Robert Bentley’s alleged affair that got him removed from office to the new allegations against Moore involved in sexual liaisons with teen age girls when he was in his 30s.

Jones portrayed Moore as an “embarrassment” to the state — a reputation Jones claimed Moore earned even before the women’s allegations first surfaced last month. He was removed from office on the Alabama Supreme Court twice for not following the law and the Constitution. Moore likes to bandy about a pocket Constitution at his events, and seems to claim that he is the only one around who understands it and says it’s based on the Bible, not secular law.

Scholars disagree.

When It Was Done Right: Justice Hugo Black, Religion and Alabama

A Sunday School Lesson From Hugo Black to Judge Roy Moore

Jones took his strongest stand to date on behalf of the women who say they were sexually abused by Moore.

“Roy Moore was already an embarrassment to this state before nine courageous women chose to share their deeply personal and disturbing encounters with him from a time when he was a 30-something year old assistant district attorney and they were only teenagers, one as young as 14,” Jones charged. “By any objective standard, it is crystal clear that these women are telling the truth and Roy Moore is not. I believe these women and so should you.”

“Will we tell our daughters that if you are abused and if you speak out, you will be believed and Alabama will stand with you regardless of when you come forward? Or will we tell our young sons that this behavior is OK? If you are powerful enough or important enough, Alabama will simply look the other way?

“We did not look the other way with Robert Bentley when his conduct involved consenting adults. And we cannot do it now when it involves children no matter how long ago it might have occurred,” he said. “We need to look at this as parents, as grandparents and not through the jaded lens of politics. This is about decency not a political party and anyone who thinks otherwise, should be ashamed. It is the people of Alabama, the parents of Alabama, who will hold Roy Moore accountable. This is about Alabama’s honor and doing what is right.”

Second Amendment Right to Bear Arms

Jones bristled at the claim by Moore and his supporters that he does not support the Second Amendment right to bear arms, a routine charge by Republicans these days against any Democrat. They spent eight years claiming President Obama was “coming after their guns,” when in fact, under the Obama administration, guns were for the first time allowed in national parks.

“When you see me with a gun, folks, I’ll be climbing in and out of a deer stand or a turkey blind,” Jones said, “not prancing around on a stage in a cowboy suit.”

Tough on Crime

In response to a charge by Moore’s campaign that he is soft on crime, Jones said as U.S. attorney his office “prosecuted hundreds drug dealers and violent criminals in order to make our community safer … And I had one of the toughest child protection units in the country, prosecuting predators who would sexually exploit our children.”

He investigated and prosecuted the anti-abortion bomber Eric Rudolph, who he called a “terrorist” who detonated a bomb that killed a Birmingham police officer. He also tried and convicted members of the Ku Klux Klan, “who sought to use fear, hatred, and violence to inhibit the rights and freedoms of others.”

In an emotional moment, with his voice shaking and his eyes tearing up, he talked about what he called “my proudest moment” when he “got the chance to help bring healing to this community for an act so despicable, that it altered the course of the civil rights movement, our state and our country.”

On Sunday, September 15, 1963, members of the Ku Klux Klan planted a bomb beneath the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. The ensuing explosion wounded more than 20 people and killed four little girls.

He read off their names: “Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Morris Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair,” and said: “Addie Mae’s sister Sarah was severely injured.”

“When I accepted the challenge of prosecuting two of the men responsible — Tommy Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry — I understood that, as an Alabamian and an American, it would be the most important task that I would ever undertake,” Jones said.

“In my closing argument I told the jury that ‘It’s never too late for the truth to be told … It’s never too late for a man to be held accountable for his crimes.’ I could not have been prouder than when, after more than 35 years, the perpetrators of that terrible crime were finally brought to justice. I believe that closing that chapter on our ugly history was an essential step to bringing people from every corner of this state closer together. The guilty verdicts were in many ways representative of just how far Alabama has come since those dark days.”

A vote for Moore, Jones argued, would continue Alabama’s recent trend of backing disgraced politicians.

“Alabama has been embarrassed long enough by political leaders who have not been leaders at all,” Jones said.

Economic Development

He made the case that the state has much to be proud of, “from the tech hub in Huntsville, to the medical and health care community in Birmingham, to the maritime, aviation, and trade infrastructure in Mobile, to the automobile manufacturing industry throughout the state.

“Our potential is boundless,” he said.

But he also talked about the challenges we face.

“Our schools in many regions of the state are under-performing and are well below national standards,” he said. “Overall health care is a mess and our rural hospitals, which are often a vital lifeline both for the economy of the area and as treatment centers for communities, are in crisis and disappearing at alarming rates.”

Yet while we have had our struggles, he said, “we have not been able to get much relief because of the perpetual dysfunction in Washington. The extreme partisanship that has emerged over the last few years has made it nearly impossible for anyone to get anything done for the betterment of our nation or for the benefit of its people.”

He said he has spent his career in service to the people of the state as an attorney, “working with anyone, regardless of their politics or beliefs, in order to help the people… I’ll take that same approach to the halls of the Senate and work across the political aisle with anyone – whether it’s Senator Shelby and members of our Congressional delegation, or anyone else who recognizes that our responsibility — our duty and obligation — is to work for the people, not to drive self-serving political interests.”

He seems sincere that he wants to go to Washington “to address the issues that every day Alabamians are facing and to fix the institutions that our vital to our health and our economy.

“My top priority is working to make sure everyone in Alabama has access to affordable health care, especially our seniors, veterans, pregnant women, and our children,” he said. “Right now, our Congress is so gridlocked that they haven’t been able to find a solution to renew funding for the Children’s Health Care Program. The CHIP funding helps more than 150,000 Alabama kids have access to healthcare that couldn’t otherwise afford it.

“Today these programs are in jeopardy and I will fight for their funding because providing healthcare is not just an investment in the future of those children,” he said. “It is an investment in our future.”

Roy Moore Meets Steve Bannon

Meanwhile down in Baldwin County, Steve Bannon of Breitbart News showed up in Fairhope to defend former judge Roy Moore against charges of being a sexual predator of teenagers, and to try to make the case why Moore should be the next U.S. Senator from Alabama.

Watch the full video here:

I am not going to take the time or go to the trouble to transcribe this garbled presentation of what purports to be an extemporaneous speech. These are not just random thoughts, people. There is sophisticated research behind this, just like the research Donald Trump used to craft his speeches and Twitter tweets in the campaign.

To thinking people this appears to be garbled nonsense, and normal, average working people as well as intellectuals marvel at all the contradictions in what is said here. No one thought Trump would ever get elected with his broken English and incomplete sentences. To many this just sounds like crazy talk, psychobabble. But Bannon’s funder, Robert Mercer, wrote an algorithm to discover key words and phrases from Facebook and Google data on what disgruntled people were saying: The issues they were talking about, the words and phrases they were using to express their anger.

If you listen to both of these speeches with that thought in mind, it might help you understand what’s really going on here.

Over here at what we like to call Camp David on the Gulf Coast, we had a round table discussion last night about all of this. I have written about this before, and wish more people would follow closely what we say, write and do. We will have more to say about this in the days ahead, no matter what happens in this election on Dec. 12.

But for now, even if you love or hate Bannon and Moore, love or hate Doug Jones, listen to what’s said in these videos with the context of what I just said in mind.

One notable example. Notice how Bannon praises veterans and our foreign wars on one hand, standing up for America as the greatest country on earth willing to take on the “radical Muslim extremist terrorists” in the Middle East, then attacking the Republicans in Washington for the “trillions” of dollars spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. How can you have it both ways? Support the military and veterans yet attack the war spending?

Well, their research shows that people will jump up on their feet to cheer both ideas, as contradictory as they may seem. More analysis is clearly needed to explain this phenomenon. We are working on it.

Feel free to point out more of this in the comments with your reactions. We really do wish to have a dialogie with our readers on these things. But we are not interested in trolls making false claims anonymously. We don’t publish that tripe.

More Photos

Steve Bannon of Breitbart News speaks on behalf of Judge Roy Moore at Oak Hollow Farm in Fairhope , Alabama, with one week to go in U.S Senate race, Dec. 5, 2017: Photo by Glynn Wilson

Steve Bannon of Breitbart News speaks on behalf of Judge Roy Moore at Oak Hollow Farm in Fairhope , Alabama, with one week to go in U.S Senate race, Dec. 5, 2017: Photo by Glynn Wilson

Steve Bannon of Breitbart News speaks on behalf of Judge Roy Moore at Oak Hollow Farm in Fairhope , Alabama, with one week to go in U.S Senate race, Dec. 5, 2017: Photo by Glynn Wilson

Former judge Roy Moore speaks at Oak Hollow Farm in Fairhope with one week to go in U.S Senate race, Dec. 5, 2017: Photo by Glynn Wilson

Former judge Roy Moore speaks at Oak Hollow Farm in Fairhope with one week to go in U.S Senate race, Dec. 5, 2017: Photo by Glynn Wilson

Former judge Roy Moore speaks at Oak Hollow Farm in Fairhope with one week to go in U.S Senate race, Dec. 5, 2017: Photo by Glynn Wilson