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As soon as the Alabama Senate race was called for Democrat Doug Jones, Republicans quickly retreated to their corners to begin their frantic finger pointing.
“Congratulations to the Bannon wing of the @GOP for gifting a seat to @SenateDems in one of the reddest states,” Republican Representative Carlos Curbelo of Florida wrote on Twitter Wednesday, referring to Moore backer Steve Bannon, the anti-establishment ally of President Donald Trump. “You have no future in our country’s politics.”
Absolutely. Let's dispense with this notion that Steve Bannon is anything more than an opportunistic skeeve who happened to show up at the right place at the right time to take credit for an ignominious win he didn't even engineer.
That said—the loss of a gimme Senate seat in one of the deepest of red states is really a failed enterprise that's wholly owned by the entire GOP. Let's assess the biggest losers, shall we?
Trump
LOL. Ol’ grabby hands is now a two-time loser in Alabama. Couldn't be sweeter. Here's his sad after-the-fact spin that he always knew Moore was a crap candidate.
“The reason I originally endorsed Luther Strange (and his numbers went up mightily), is that I said Roy Moore will not be able to win the General Election,” Trump said on Twitter Wednesday morning. “I was right! Roy worked hard but the deck was stacked against him!”
Sure. That's why he went all in with tweets and robocalls and a campaign appearance for Moore—because that's how you distance yourself when you just know in your gut that someone's gonna lose. Actually if you add Trump's endorsement of Virginia loser Ed Gillespie into the mix, his endorsement is starting to look like the kiss of death.
On top of that, Trump can now feel all the women who have accused him of sexual assault breathing down his neck just like the assault victims that became Moore’s undoing. It's only a matter of time, Donnie. Welcome to your new reality—you’re now definitively on the wrong side of a reckoning that has been toppling powerful men like a tsunami sweeping through a village of miscreants.
Bannon
Sorry, Steve. You almost single-handedly created this GOP debacle by backing a 19th century candidate who espoused 19th century values traveling on 19th century transportation (poor Sassy the Pinto ... her gait will never be the same).
Bannon, by backing Moore, "cost us a critical Senate seat in one of the most Republican states in the country," said Steven Law, leader of a political action committee aligned with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Yep. We all know that it was Bannon whispering in Trump's ear to get behind Moore (did I just write that?).
Republican Representative Peter King of New York accused Bannon of demeaning the government and the political process. “This guy does not belong on the national stage" and looks like a "disheveled drunk," King said in an interview with CNN Wednesday. Although Bannon goes out of his way to put on an "everyman" image, he is in fact a "Goldman Sachs millionaire," King said.
He's a fraud, for sure. But we have to part ways with King on one thing—we want to see a lot more of Bannon on the national stage, poisoning the well for every GOP candidate he touches.
Whether he will continue to have the cash at his disposal to do that is an open question. It depends on how stupid his benefactors (the Mercers) are.
Mitch
McConnell also got a lashing.
“Mitch McConnell and the Republican establishment got their wish: they successfully delivered Alabama to a liberal Democrat,” said adviser Andy Surabian.
Sure enough, but not for the reason Surabian probably thinks. It's the GOP's awful policies and their utter inability to govern, led by McConnell, that have already landed Republicans in a 2018 ditch that's only going to get deeper by the day.
They ran on the faulty premise of improving health care by repealing Obamacare, they're throttling through a tax bill that polls in the 20s and the vast majority of Americans rightfully believe favors the rich, and they're letting 9 million Americans kids go without healthcare access because they simply don't care about anyone but the richest one percent of the nation. It's unconscionable, frankly, and Republicans will pay the price in 2018, starting right now, right here in 2017 with Jones’s win.
McConnell may have tried to torpedo Moore's candidacy, but he built the conditions that made a Democrat viable in the Alabama to begin with. If his policies had been even remotely popular, if the GOP was accomplishing anything at all that actually improved the lives of voters, McConnell's guy Luther Strange would have won the primary to begin with.
Instead, McConnell is now down one seat to a 51-49 majority and still he's taking that repudiation as a mandate to jam through his abysmal tax bill anyway.
McConnell will rue the day he did that, relegating himself to a footnote in history for leading one of the least ethical and most lawless Senate caucuses in American politics by both stealing a Supreme Court seat and engineering a massive regressive redistribution of wealth on a bare majority party-line vote.
Welcome to your political epitaph, Mitch.