Green Thoughts on Alabama Special Election

Is now an appropriate time to mention that write-ins probably cost Roy Moore the election?

Because you can't support voters having alternate choices only some of the time. pic.twitter.com/5qXTtTjpKW

— Green Party US □ (@GreenPartyUS) December 13, 2017

This is one of those posts that doesn't lend itself to coherent paragraphs or reduction to a single main idea. It's more of an Unordered List post, because I have such multi-faceted thoughts and feelings about what happened Tuesday in the state of Ala-fuckin'-bama. I'm referring, as you might guess, to the special election that Alabama held to fill the US Senate seat left vacant after the appointment of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions to the top spot in the Department of Justice (he typed while strenuously suppressing gales of laughter at seeing the words "Sessions" and "Justice" in the same sentence).

No, wait. Before giving you the bullets, I guess there is a two-part main point I'd like to make, which the bullets kind of undergird:

1. This election demonstrates why the United States as a nation needs third parties—or, at the very least, reforms to our political and media structures to make independent candidacies more viable.
2. This election hammered home for me how, in a two-dominant-party system such as ours, voting for a candidate based on that candidate's chances of winning perpetuates the duopoly.

And now, the post-Moore-tem brain-dump:

• First off, Oh. My. Gawd.
• Yes, I'm glad that Doug Jones (the guy who won conviction of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombers, not the legendary relief pitcher for the Astros) won this race.
• I'm especially happy for some friends of mine who made phone calls or even traveled to Alabama to help with the Jones campaign.
• I'm also happy to see People Power at work, overcoming Roy Moore and all the odiousness that he embodies, by reminding the voters of Alabama that democracy isn't something you have, but something you do.
• I hope that this result will generate the momentum that will keep Alabama's African American population engaged in the process, aware that they have the numbers and the passion to overcome (and eventually overturn) the state's wretched record on civil and voting rights.
• Even before the extraordinary well-timed accusations of sexual impropriety were leveled at Moore, his odiousness was well known, and a majority of Republican primary voters were OK with all of his -isms and -phobic traits. But then, primary voters, especially of the Republican ilk, tend toward ideological rigor and intense party loyalty.

Exit polling data from CNN.com, for the Alabama special senatorial election, 12 December 2017.

• The graphic that your liberal-to-progressive Facebook friends keep posting, showing exit poll numbers broken down by race and sex? Da-amn. It's no exaggeration to say that there are two Alabamas, and you know which two I mean. No disrespect intended to the 28% of white voters who punched their ticket for Jones, but almost all the rest voted for a bigoted ass-clown who may also be an ephebophile.
• Using that word ephebophile is not going to win me any friends among people (including Green comrades) who insisted on calling Moore a pedophile, a term with much more trigger power. The jury is out on whether ephebophilia is a form of pedophilia, i.e., a pathology.
• The following observation in no way excuses Moore or the excesses of the 1970s: Regarding what he has admitted to, pursuing and initiating sexual contact with 16-year-olds when he was a 30-something prosecuting attorney, as icky as we may consider it in the more enlightened 2010s, was considered normal male behavior in the 1970s, particularly in a state where 16 has long been the age of consent.
• I feel the need to bathe now, inside and out.
• Now let's address the (at least!) 22,780 Alabamians who cast write-in votes, or just under 1.7% of the vote. That is an unusually high percentage, to say the least. And yes, there were more of them than the as-yet-unofficial margin of victory for Jones.
• As you may have seen, there were seven official write-in candidates. Seven. The wiki entry notes that only one was a Republican, but I think I saw two with (R) next to their names on Politico. One of the seven is a Libertarian, and four ran as independents.
• The write-ins served as a safety vote for Republicans who could not in good conscience vote for Moore. (Now you can suppress that laughter, because despite appearances, Republicans with consciences do exist. A helluva lot of conscientious Republicans voted for Luther Strange in the special primary.) Did those votes make a difference? Did they make the difference? I'm inclined to say yep.
• So any Democrat who celebrates the write-in/third-party vote making the difference in the outcome, or who even admits that it's a good thing for Democrats, is now invited to stop whining forever about Greens and other progressives stealing votes from the Democratic nominee.
• I personally won't fault Democrats caught in a moment of cognitive dissonance on this topic for deflecting it shifting the focus to the awesome contribution of black women in this election. Give them bonus points for insisting that their party not only recognize that contribution, but (1) stop taking the African American vote for granted, (2) stop abandoning Democrats trapped in the Deep Red South, and (3) start pushing policies that benefit the poor and people of color (e.g., Medicare for All, $15 minimum wage, ending mass incarceration). (EDIT: I will admit that this paragraph was influenced by a tweet from Sen. Kamala Harris, but I reckon that my suggestions for recompense go further than hers. She said nothing about Medicare for All, for example.)
• Speaking of Politico, why does this bozo think that Jones's supporting Obamacare would "make [Bernie] Sanders proud"? Sanders is more of a single-payer guy. Also, just as Sanders de-emphasized foreign policy in his campaign, the article contains nary a word on Jones's foreign affairs positions. He has positioned himself as a moderate who will 
• All the noise from people and groups demanding that Jones be sworn in and seated before the Senate votes on the Trump Tax Scam (as in some email I've received) are asking a bit too much. Although the margin of victory is fairly comfortable, the various counties in Alabama likely will not complete certification of the vote until the 22nd. Senator pro tempore Strange will be able to cast that vote.
• Yes, a Democrat winning a Senate seat in Alabama for the first time since 1992 is a historic achievement. If Jones intends to keep that seat, or to pass it along to another Democrat, the whole crew will need to campaign its collective ass off in 2020. Also, of course, the African American turnout numbers will need to be repeated or improved.
• Moore most likely would not have lasted past 2020 either. If elected to the Senate, he would have made Alabama even more of an international embarrassment than it already is (and yes, I'm quite aware of my own state's worldwide reputation). He would have been largely ineffective, and what little he could accomplish would motivate the state's Democrats to kick his ass out at the next opportunity.
• As Caitlin Johnstone repeatedly reminds us, the more appalling Republican nominees get, the more entitled Democrats feel to nominate Wall Street puppets and then bully Progressives into supporting those puppets because at least they're not those Wall Street puppets in the red neckties. This, in my view, is only slightly less objectionable than the Republicans who put party over principle and vote for the racist sexist homophobic Islamophobic accused ephebophile who pines for the good ol' days of chattel slavery.

I'm sure there's more, but that's enough for now.