http://donsurber.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-real-high-ground-in-moore-case.html
By Don Surber
November 14, 2017
Caitlin Flanagan at the Atlantic is horrified. The bill for defending Bill Clinton came in. The price is her silence as Judge Roy Moore stands accused of touching a 14-year-old girl back n the 1970s.
Just like all the Hollywood apologists for Roman Polanski, Flanagan and her fellow feminists have absolutely no moral standing in this case.
Kennedy drowned a woman. He stayed in the Senate, got a Portuguese water dog, and named him Splash.
But she tries.
The Democratic Party needs to make its own reckoning of the way it protected Bill Clinton. The party needs to come to terms with the fact that it was so enraptured by their brilliant, Big Dog president and his stunning string of progressive accomplishments that it abandoned some of its central principles. The party was on the wrong side of history and there are consequences for that. Yet expedience is not the only reason to make this public accounting. If it is possible for politics and moral behavior to coexist, then this grave wrong needs to be acknowledged. If Weinstein and Mark Halperin and Louis C.K. and all the rest can be held accountable, so can our former president and so can his party, which so many Americans so desperately need to rise again.
Reckoning?
Now?
Why?
Because he is totally out of power. He's Jimmy Carter without a hammer. Clinton will never be president again, or the first openly male first lady, or even the father of a president.
Sure, sacrifice him now.
Some pseudo-conservatives want us to sacrifice Judge Moore to show some moral superiority.
Moral superiority is the presumption of innocence.
It's tough, isn't it?
But being moral - being American - being true to the Constitution - is not easy.
Emmett Till didn't get that presumption. According to the NAACP, between 1882 and 1968, we did not give the presumption of innocence to 4,743 men who were lynched.
In 1991, the Democratic Party was split on whether to give Justice Clarence Thomas the presumption of innocence.
Clinton of course was guilty. He admitted it. But Democrats - and many Republicans - defended him, and the Senate refused to convict him for perjury and suborning perjury after his impeachment.
Now some senators want to expel Moore before the election.
Phooey. That's virtue signaling.
Absent an admission of guilt between now and Election Day, he deserves the support of every Republican and of every conservative.
Vote for Moore and be a conservative, or vote for someone else and be a liberal.
Anything else is nonsense.
If the allegations have merit, then the women should file police reports, investigators should gather evidence, a judge should impanel a grand jury, and if there is an indictment, the prosecutor should try the man.
If he is found guilty, the Senate should expel him.
That's a lengthy process in an impatient and self-absorbed society.
Too damned bad.
Bob Menendez just faced a trial, and his fate is in the hands of the jury. He's still in the Senate - as he should be. I can see an acquittal on all charges.
Standing by the presumption of innocence and the due process that goes with it are the real high ground.
The rest is self-righteous gobbledy-gook.
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. ~ D.H. Lawrence
| 
