Former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, twice booted from office for failure to obey law, a darling of Russian-influenced (see Hamilton 68) Breitbart founder and ex-Trump advisor Steven Bannon, of Sarah Palin et al, won a U.S. Senate seat in a rout of incumbent Luther Strange.
The American oblast right is reading right out of the hymnal composed by their saint, Vladimir of Moscow, who imprisoned Pussy Riot over a take-over demonstration in an Orthodox church. Judge Moore was excommunicated from the bench for having a statue of the Ten Commandments next to him. Saint Vladimir tried to keep gays out of the Sochi Olympics; Judge Moore refused to follow federal law on gay marriage. The line between church and state will be made more vague if Judge, soon-to-be-Senator, Moore has his way and the centrifugal force of anti-federalism will be enhanced. What more could Saint Vladimir want in a senator?
Moore's win is a win for Russian-inspired Trumpism, if not for Trump himself, who campaigned, somewhat equivocally, for Strange. (That, in fact, is what he was doing in Huntsville last Friday.) In Trump Putin has one of his little Twitter birds-of-chaos perched in the highest office in the land and in Moore yet another in the higher branch of the national legislature. The Russian takeover of the Republican Party proceeds apace and it will be more (intended) unable to govern, which is the point.
Putin's birds-of-a-feather could not have roosted in perches where locals were waiting for them with shotguns. In the hills and valleys of Alabama and Pennsylvania, in the swamps of Louisiana, throughout rural and suburban America North and South the flocks were greeted with feed, laid out by locals and supplied them over the years by the Tea Party, by Breitbart, Ann Coulter, and David Duke.
The American oblast right is reading right out of the hymnal composed by their saint, Vladimir of Moscow, who imprisoned Pussy Riot over a take-over demonstration in an Orthodox church. Judge Moore was excommunicated from the bench for having a statue of the Ten Commandments next to him. Saint Vladimir tried to keep gays out of the Sochi Olympics; Judge Moore refused to follow federal law on gay marriage. The line between church and state will be made more vague if Judge, soon-to-be-Senator, Moore has his way and the centrifugal force of anti-federalism will be enhanced. What more could Saint Vladimir want in a senator?
Moore's win is a win for Russian-inspired Trumpism, if not for Trump himself, who campaigned, somewhat equivocally, for Strange. (That, in fact, is what he was doing in Huntsville last Friday.) In Trump Putin has one of his little Twitter birds-of-chaos perched in the highest office in the land and in Moore yet another in the higher branch of the national legislature. The Russian takeover of the Republican Party proceeds apace and it will be more (intended) unable to govern, which is the point.
Putin's birds-of-a-feather could not have roosted in perches where locals were waiting for them with shotguns. In the hills and valleys of Alabama and Pennsylvania, in the swamps of Louisiana, throughout rural and suburban America North and South the flocks were greeted with feed, laid out by locals and supplied them over the years by the Tea Party, by Breitbart, Ann Coulter, and David Duke.
