https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/12/15/doug-jones-eager-to-speak-for-the-south-embraces-the-spotlight/
David Weigel reports for the Washington Post:
“Doug Jones, weeks away from taking office as Alabama’s first Democratic senator since 1996, is not done talking about his win. On Wednesday, as national TV cameras rolled, he spent 26 minutes talking about his goals for 2018. On Thursday, he talked to the hosts of “Pod Save America” — a tastemaking podcast for liberals — about how he won. And on Sunday, he will be interviewed by Chris Wallace on Fox broadcast channel, and the show will be repeated later in the day on Fox News — a cable channel on which many Democrats refuse to appear.
So far, Jones has not made much news since his victory, ducking the Democratic fight over whether he should be seated in time to cast a vote on the GOP tax bill. (“We’ve still got a process in Alabama that we have to go though,” he said on “Pod Save America.”) He’s said more about how he won — as a “kitchen table” pragmatist and critic of Republican policy — and his hope that the South’s Republican dominance may start to crack.
“I believe we are on the road to having a competitive two-party state,” Jones said at Wednesday’s news conference.
Jones had been talking like that for months, though rarely before a national audience, and not in stump speeches. But as Republicans knew, and as they failed to exploit Tuesday, Jones did not run as a conservative and rarely took the Trump administration’s side on key issues. Most of Jones’s television ads, especially in the last month, portrayed the election as a choice between a Democrat who could “work with anybody” and a Republican who would engage in futile, embarrassing grandstanding.
In interviews, however, Jones often spoke of a different choice for Alabama — whether they wanted to send a new representative of the Deep South to the national stage. In an August interview with The Washington Post, before much national attention had driven toward his campaign, Jones said he would have theoretically opposed Jeff Sessions’s nomination for attorney general. He rattled off the reasons: Sessions was too harsh on voting rights and criminal-justice issues.”
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Read the rest of the article at the link.
Jones might have added “bigot, racist, xenophobe, White Nationalist, homophobe, Islamophobe, bully, liar, theocrat, sexist, and “D-grade legal mind,” to the reasons. But, we get the point. Even in Alabama, Sessions’s obvious bias, retrograde views, and general lack of qualifications for high office were well known.
In other words, if you remove the pedophelia, the ridiculous leather vest, poor little pony, waving pistol, and totally obnoxious wife, then “Gonzo” is “Ayatollah Roy.”
Unfortunately, Gonzo has been able to do even more damage to our country, our Constitution, and our future (e.g.,our “Dreamers“) as an appointed official than he was in the Senate (perhaps because he was so, well, “Gonzo,” that even in his own party nobody took his “parallel universe” 1950’s segregationist view of America seriously). Probably happy enough to get rid of him as a colleague, the GOP inflicted him on the entire nation!
But, the majority of Americans who don’t believe in Gonzo’s “Apocalyptic Vision” don’t have to put up with this travesty indefinitey. Hopefully, working with colleagues on both sides of the aisle, and drawing on the abysmal record of “Gonzo in action,” Doug Jones will be able to use “the system” to work cooperatively with others to remove the most stunningly unqualified Attorney General since John Mitchell from office.
We can all hope.
PWS
12-15-17