Draining the Swamp? Or Filling the Cesspool?

Republican senate candidate Roy Moore

It's been eye-opening hearing the reactions of conservative supporters of embattled Alabama Republican senate candidate Roy Moore try and justify their support for a man accused of having engaged in inappropriate sexual contact with girls as young as 14 and 16 years-old when he was the District Attorney of Etowah County in his 30's.

On NPR the other night I heard a woman from Alabama dismiss the accusations by saying young girls from Alabama mature quicker than other girls and look older than they are.

Earlier today, two days after a sixth woman named Tina Johnson stepped forward to accuse Moore of having grabbed her buttocks as she was leaving a meeting in his law office in 1991, Moore's wife Kayla dutifully appeared on the steps outside the state Capitol building in Montgomery alongside a handful of conservative Republican women to try and rally support for her husband.

She insisted that he wasn't stepping down in the face of what she called a slander campaign generated by the "liberal media" and "the Washington establishment" before attacking Moore's opponent, Democratic candidate Doug Jones for his positions on abortion and gun control.

As Andy Campbell reported for the Huffington Post earlier today, a bearded 58-year-old Moore supporter named Tim Hensley said allegations of sex with underage girls wouldn't dissuade his decision to back the controversial candidate:

"This was 40 years ago. I probably did some things I wasn't proud of then. I'd forgive him unless we found out about something, say, five years ago."   

Apparently the old saying "Time heals all things" holds particularly true in Alabama.

Real Washington Post reporter Lenny Bernstein 

But the obviously faked "Lenny Bernstein" robo-calls that a number of people from Alabama reported receiving earlier this week shed light on the local conservative Republican establishment's willingness to stir up anti-Semitic bigotry to try and undermine the legitimacy of the Washington Post story about the accusations against Moore.

Audio tapes released by the media reflect a truly deep-seated bias.

As The Atlantic reported on Tuesday (the same day that the sixth accuser came forward to accuse Moore of inappropriate sexual contact...), the robo-calls came from an undisclosed "private number" .

If you haven't heard the call, take a minute or two to listen to a recording received by a local pastor.

The nasally voice and phony New York accent offering $5,000 - $7,000 for women between the ages of 54 to 57 willing to offer damaging remarks on Roy Moore to send an email to the fictitious "lberstein@washingtonpost.com" (which is not the address used by Washington Post employees) are so obviously intended to stoke feelings of anti-Semitism that they reek of the alt-right movement's efforts to try and elect a right-wing anti-establishment Republican endorsed by former White House adviser and known anti-Semite Steve Bannon.

The real Lenny Bernstein, who reports on health issues for the Washington Post, not politics, released a statement on Twitter calling the robo-calls using his name an "Appalling effort to discredit the great work the Post and other journos do."

Tactics like that seem to reflect a broader embrace of a troubling authoritarian trend that has emerged in the wake of the 2016 election of a man who delights in exhorting his followers to dismiss the press as "fake news".

Karen Fonseca arrested for expressing her opinion

Particularly when the news is reporting stories that are related to Russian interference in the 2016 elections and the growing evidence that members of the Trump campaign knowingly colluded with representatives of Putin's government along with puppets of the Russian intelligence community like Wikileaks.

Read the MotherJones.com article about Wikileaks giving Donald Trump, Jr. the stolen password to a site that was preparing to post info about his dad's ties to Russia - you can bet special counsel Robert Mueller has.

But those kinds of overt attacks on the media have also extended to private citizens expressing anti-Trump opinions too, as evidenced by BuzzFeed reporter Brianna Sacks' November 16th article about a Texas woman who was arrested on Thursday for having a large "Fuck Trump" decal on the rear window of the pickup truck owned by her husband.

As Sacks reported, Karen Fonseca has been repeatedly pulled over by local members of law enforcement and was the recent target of a social media post by Fort Bend County Sheriff Troy Nehls who posted a photo of Fonseca's truck saying that the local prosecutor was willing to file disorderly conduct charges against the owner.

The Texas branch of the ACLU was quick to post a message on Facebook reminding the Trump-loving sheriff that in the case of Cohen v. California, the Supreme Court overturned the conviction of a man convicted of disturbing the peace for wearing a jacket in a courtroom that said "Fuck the draft".

Pro-Trump Fort Bend County Sheriff Troy Nehls

So unfortunately for Trump supporters, including Sheriff Nehls, this is still America and displaying the word "Fuck" as a form of protest is a right protected under the First Amendment.

Sheriff Nehls none the less jailed Fonseca on an outstanding felony warrant for possession and use of a fake ID.

That kind of crap reeks of Third World authoritarian oppression.

It's kind of like irate Republicans on Capitol Hill trying to use the Uranium One deal with Russia back in 2010 as a lame excuse to begin yet another round of Congressional investigations into Hillary Clinton in order to try and deflect attention from the ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

Even though as Shepard Smith of Fox News and FactCheck.org (among others) have reported, the decision to allow ARMZ, the mining arm of the Russian nuclear energy agency Rosatom, to acquire a 51% stake in the company Uranium One was not made by then-Secretary of State Clinton alone as some Republicans are trying to suggest.

It was made by the nine-member Committee of Foreign Investments in the United States which includes the secretaries of State, Treasury, Homeland Security, Defense, Commerce and Energy - and the Attorney General.

Beyond that, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission also reviewed and approved the deal.

Republican attempts to use a deal made over seven years ago to stir up the deep-seated hatred of Hillary Clinton is a reflection of the degree to which the GOP will sink to try and distract Americans from the massive ethical lapses of the Trump administration.

And the mounting evidence that Trump campaign advisers knowingly conspired with Russia to affect the outcome of the 2016 elections.

Conservative efforts to undermine the Washington Post's reporting on the multiple women who've gone on record to accuse Roy Moore of inappropriate sexual contact (including pedophilia and assault), and conservative members of law enforcement and business attacking people who oppose Trump (remember Juli Briskman was fired by her employer for giving Trump's motorcade the bird) reflects a party's desperate attempts to silence opposition to a man who campaigned on a populist promise to "drain the swamp" - but instead is filling the cesspool.