After Democrat Doug Jones’ upset win over Roy Moore in Alabama’s senate race this week, the Republican civil war continued as Karl Rove took some shots at Moore-backer Steve Bannon on Fox News.
Fox’s Your World show cut away from Jones’ first press conference since his victory in order to get Karl Rove’s Republican analysis. He used a chunk of that time to go after Bannon.
Cavuto said, “We are continuing to monitor this,” meaning they would tell us if Jones said anything of interest to Republicans. Then Cavuto turned to Rove.
Rove slammed Moore’s call for a recount, calling him “a spoilsport” and “not being gracious in conceding defeat.” Rove also attacked Moore’s “record of controversy” that goes beyond the pedophilia. Moore, Rove noted, was “twice ejected from the Alabama Supreme Court as chief justice for, in the first case, for defying a federal court order, and in the second case, ordering the probate judges of Alabama to ignore a U.S. Supreme Court opinion.”
Rove also noted some of Moore’s inflammatory comments such as his claim that 9/11 may have happened because we “distanced ourselves from God” and that Ronald Reagan’s quote about the Soviet Union being an evil empire could “very well” apply to America today. Moore also “supported a nutty, racist, bigoted candidate for president in 2004,” Rove added.
Nevertheless, Rove gave Trump a pass for having supported Moore because the loss of a Republican seat in the Senate “is going to complicate his life enormously.”
Yet Rove also downplayed the significance of Jones’ win and suggested that unless Jones votes as a Republican, his tenure in the Senate will be a brief anomaly. “The question’s going to be, does he want to have a political career in Alabama because Alabama remains a deep-red state,” Rove said. “This was one man. Republicans nominated the one man who could squander the seat and he did.”
But Rove saved his strongest comments for Bannon. “I didn’t see some magic army of Bannonites” get out the vote for Moore, Rove said. Then he really stuck the proverbial knife into Moore.
ROVE: [Bannon] did go and give two speeches in which he managed to insult the University of Alabama by declaring it a second-rate educational institution compared to the two universities that he, Steve Bannon, attended, Georgetown and Harvard. And he showed up looking like a - I don’t know – like a scruffy, out-of-work homeless guy. I mean, three shirts layered on each other, underneath a fatigue jacket, unshaven and ranting and raving at the so-called establishment in Washington - thereby discouraging Republicans from uniting behind his candidate. They gave no reason to unite behind their candidate except it would be a stick in the eye of Republicans in Washington. That is not a winning message, even in a deep-red state like Alabama.
Rove took another, albeit indirect, stab at Bannon by disputing predictions of a Democratic wave in 2018 if Republicans run “good candidates.” He said pointedly. “There’s never been as favorable a landscape” for them.
Watch Rove fire a round of shots in the Republican Civil War below, from the December 13, 2017 Your World.
Most of the damage Trump and his minions are causing should be able to be redressed after The Great Upheaval next November. So let’s sit back and enjoy.