Thou Shalt

      The Republicans' record on putting forth candidates for high office doesn't always conform to common standards of morality.  Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, the second George Bush, Dan Quayle, Dick Cheney, Paul Ryan, and now Roy Moore of Alabama, called "a great guy" by fellow Republican Donald Trump, all lacked or lack, for various reasons, the human thing that prevents most people from committing horrible acts against other human beings.
     I don't believe one has to be a degenerate to be a politician, but an inability to do right on behalf of the less powerful characterizes the above-mentioned men, as it also characterizes many Democrats, like Barack Obama, who slaughtered civilians in the Middle East and Africa, made the big banks bigger, deported more illegal immigrants than any other president, prided himself as an assassin, and strengthened government secrecy even as he claimed transparency.
     Obama's example represents, for some, the dubious maxim that as president, one's job is very difficult, the most difficult in the world; therefore, some unintended consequences, like blowing up the wrong people, is just part of the job.  I stopped buying into this idea many years ago when I realized that I never heard a president, Democratic or Republican, demonstrate remorse for committing what would normally be regarded in our civil society as mass manslaughter.  If someone accidentally kills dozens of people, including children, there's a legal investigation, at least.  Obama and every other president will never be investigated for their epic number of acts of "collateral damage."  Powerful people in our country and elsewhere get away with casual killing so often and so predictably that it's become something most citizens shrug their shoulders at.
     Not me.
     An Alabama politician, Roy Moore, runs for the U.S. Senate.  His background as a district attorney, judge, and during the Vietnam War, as a military policeman, qualifies him as a law and order candidate who happens to love God, the Ten Commandments, and guns.  In recent weeks it's also been revealed that he loves having sex with teenaged girls.  In the 1970s he (allegedly) molested a fourteen year old girl.  He was assistant district attorney at the time, an authority figure with power, especially over a kid.  In his thirties then, according to numerous reports, he regularly "dated" girls aged sixteen, seventeen, eighteen.  Age of consent in Alabama is sixteen, but one sixteen year old girl was violated by him in his car, then pushed out onto the pavement by a dumpster before he drove away.  About half a dozen women have shared their painful Moore stories, but the Republicans in both houses of Congress have been slow to condemn him without sounding like uncomfortable cowards.
     Mitch McConnell, Jeff Sessions (now the Attorney General and formerly the holder of the Senate seat in Alabama sought by Moore), Jeff Flake, John McCain, and several other Republicans have stated their belief in the women's stories about Roy Moore.  Even Paul Ryan, one of the most prominent Republican sociopaths, has expressed, in his usual insipid way, condemnation of the child molester.  It could be, and I believe this is the case, that some of these condemnations from the Right are politically motivated.  Republicans, generally, care so much about women's rights that they want to defund Planned Parenthood, thus denying millions of women healthcare.  Moore is an embarrassment to them on a moral ground, and also his association with them as their fellow Senator would taint their own images as defenders of family values, Christian style.
     Moore says he's a Christian, but his behavior is antichrist.  I imagine him as a military cop in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.  Did he violate Vietnamese girls?  He wouldn't be the only sexual predator in the U.S. military back then, or now.  Are we to believe that his predatory behavior began in Alabama after he returned from the war zone?  I suggest, based on human psychology, that Roy Moore has been a criminal most of his life.
     Or, as Trump put it in a tweet, "a great guy."
     Trump hasn't commented publicly about the Moore issue.  The President is most definitely preoccupied with the Mueller investigation (Donald Trump, Jr. is in the news again, having spoken with Wikileaks last year regarding Clinton) and also with his just completed Asia trip.  By the time this is read by anyone, it could be that we'll know what Trump has to say about his "great" Alabama guy.
     While all this goes on, seven million people in Yemen are on the verge of starvation due to the Saudi-enforced blockade and the now two and a half year old war supported logistically by the United States and by many of the same politicians here who find Moore so offensive.  Yemen's infrastructure is broken by the relentless bombing enabled by in-flight fueling by American airplanes, by cluster bombs supplied by the U.S., by fighter bombers the sale of which was enabled by former Secretary of State Clinton.  A cholera epidemic in Yemen resulted from the infrastructure destruction, potable water increasingly rare.  It's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse time in the world's poorest Arab country and seven million possibly impending deaths will top the six million Jews killed by Hitler, so can we just say it?  The United States of America may soon be a party to genocide, and the major news networks aren't even talking about it.
     Is that because we're so used to our leaders being killers, liars, suppressors of basic human rights, and, even on occasion, child molesters?  In other words, it's not even a story that the United States government will gladly aid and abet genocide committed by the Saudi government, but Donald Trump, Jr. making contact with Wikileaks to find damning information on his father's chief political opponent somehow merits anyone's surprise?
   
                                                                                 Vic Neptune