There is a reason why, when you visit Hillary Clinton's Twitter account, this is the tweet pinned to the top. It has been pinned there for a year and two days as of this writing.
"To all the little girls watching...never doubt that you are valuable and powerful & deserving of every chance & opportunity in the world."— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) November 9, 2016
The entertainment industry is rife with allegations of routine sexual assault almost as a matter of business. Both men and women are standing up with accounts of past abuses. Action has been swift and uncompromising.
At the heart of government, however, there remains the habit of "if true." We will take down a TV president for sexual assault, but not a declared candidate.
There was this.
Sundry Republicans, many from Roy Moore's home state, went on cable in his defense this week. Needless to say, the defenses were pathetic. Attempts to philosophize the allegations range from laughable to blasphemous. Please spare us, you guys. You are embarrassing yourselves!washingtonpost.com
Woman says Roy Moore initiated sexual encounter when she was 14, he was 32
By Stephanie McCrummen, Beth Reinhard and Alice Crites
Leigh Corfman, left, in a photo from 1979, when she was about 14. At right, from top, Wendy Miller around age 16, Debbie Wesson Gibson around age 17 and Gloria Thacker Deason around age 18. (Family photos)
It was early 1979 and Moore — now the Republican nominee in Alabama for a U.S. Senate seat — was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney. He struck up a conversation, Corfman and her mother say, and offered to watch the girl while her mother went inside for a child custody hearing.
“He said, ‘Oh, you don’t want her to go in there and hear all that. I’ll stay out here with her,’ ” says Corfman’s mother, Nancy Wells, 71. “I thought, how nice for him to want to take care of my little girl.”
Read more >>>>
Let's take a look at the Democrat running against Roy Moore.
I remember that bombing and had traveled enough in the Jim Crow South by then to know that I had met little girls just like these four. Both Condoleeza Rice and Angela Davis knew these little girls. For many of us, these four deaths hit with a sickening thud. Much like the Sandy Hook deaths, these children's murders said we were not protecting our must vulnerable.washingtonpost.com
1963 Birmingham church bombing: How Doug Jones prosecuted two Klansmen for killing 4 black girls
https://www.facebook.com/deneen.l.brown
From left, Denise McNair, 11; Carole Robertson, 14; Addie Mae Collins, 14, and Cynthia Dianne Wesley, 14, were killed Sept. 15, 1963, when a bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. (AP)
Yet the men responsible — members of the Ku Klux Klan who’d boasted about their role — were never tried and convicted. That changed in 1977 when Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss, the suspected ringleader of the bombing, was put on trial.
At the time, Doug Jones, now a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in a hotly contested race Alabama, was a second-year law student. He skipped classes to sit in on the trial, watching in amazement as William Joseph Baxley II, then U.S. attorney in Alabama, presented evidence against Chambliss.
Baxley had received death threats from white supremacists, including an ugly letter from KKK Grand Dragon Edward R. Fields. Baxley responded with a one-sentence missive typed on official stationery: “Dear Dr. Fields, my response to your letter of February 19, 1976, is kiss my ass. Sincerely, Bill Baxley, Attorney General.”
As Jones watched the testimony in the Jefferson County Courthouse, it became clear that Chambliss did not act alone in the bombing. The four girls killed — 11-year-old Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins and Cynthia Wesley — had been in the church basement preparing for Sunday service. Addie Mae’s sister, Sarah Jean Collins, who was 12 then, lost an eye in the explosion.
“As I gave my undivided attention to Baxley’s powerful closing argument,” Jones told a House crime subcommittee two decades later, “I never in my wildest imagination dreamed that one day this case and my legal career would come full circle, giving me the opportunity, some 24 years later to prosecute the two remaining suspects for a crime that many say changed the course of history.”
More than 20 years after Chambliss was convicted, Jones would become U.S. attorney in Alabama and set out to finish what Baxley started. He brought charges against two more Klan members, Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr., and Bobby Frank Cherry. The prosecutions have helped make him a contender in his Senate race against Republican Roy Moore, a contr oversial former judge. On Thursday, Moore was accused by a woman of initiating a sexual encounter with her when she was 14 and he was 32 — allegations he called “completely false” and his campaign dismissed as “the very definition of fake news.”
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When an industry can take strong steps in the face of assaults on the most trusting and vulnerable and government makes excuses, e.g. the ballots are printed, have gone out, folks have voted early ... there must be questions.
This is a special election for pete's sake! It cannot be rescheduled? You cannot find a more honorable candidate and replace this child molester?
Apparently the answer to all of that is no.
I suggest: perhaps instead of a negative campaign against Roy Moore, child molester, a positive campaign in favor of Doug Jones, child defender, might be in order.
This is the last big 2017 election before mid-terms. Maybe we win by emphasizing being on the right side, against the domestic terrorist organization, for that is what the Klan is, that killed little girls in their church.
There is a plethora of evidence and opinion against the bad guy. We should be pushing the creds of the good guy who took up a case so cold that he himself did not remember the incident and brought the bad guys to justice.
This is for all the little girls because you matter. As Hillary says, "...you are valuable and powerful & deserving of every chance & opportunity in the world."
I pray that Alabamans will vote for the man who held those four lives in esteem high enough to cause him to go after their killers many years past than for the guy who sends his friends on TV to giggle to Jake Tapper about how silly it is to believe what little girls remember even when they are grown ... and Republican.
