Not until this moment did I realize Moore is truly done for. If even talk radio has shifted from “he’s innocent” to “this is how Democrats behave,” then Moore’s populist base has begun to crumble beneath his feet.

Rush’s point seems to have less to do with how Moore’s political tastes might have informed his sexual tastes than that Democrats are supposedly more likely to maintain a conspiracy of silence around a predator. The idea, I think, is that the locals were more willing to keep his secrets before 1992, when he became a Republican, because Democrats look out for other Democrats. So … the locals were also Democrats before ’92? What about the fact that they’ve been keeping his secrets *since* 1992, throughout his legal battles over the Ten Commandments and gay marriage and a successful Republican primary run for Senate? What is he talking about here?

Here’s an interesting newspaper item going around, published a decade after Moore moved from (D) to (R):

Montgomery Advertiser, Oct. 13, 2002. Guess some of these people finally started talking. pic.twitter.com/9Psc2iThdz

— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) November 14, 2017

Moore’s wife Kayla (who married him in 1985, when he was a — gasp — Democrat) has been working hard in his defense on social media, posting a letter from 50 pastors who endorse her husband. But it turns out that letter was signed before the primary, with the Moore campaign adding extra paragraphs and republishing it again now. Mrs. Moore also published what appeared to be a major scoop, that the “Old Hickory House” where Beverly Young Nelson claimed to have met Moore in the late 1970s didn’t open for business in 2001. But Nelson didn’t say she met Moore at the Old Hickory House; she said she met him at the Olde Hickory House.

And that did exist in 1977.

City directory confirms Ole Hickory House stood at 305 East Meighan Blvd in Gadsden in 1977. Site now has Rally’s. pic.twitter.com/5SG707uwJp

— WilliamThornton (@billineastala) November 14, 2017

Vintage ad for The "Olde" Hickory House on Meighan Blvd., Page 21, The Gadsden Times, Jan. 2, 1978. pic.twitter.com/BHQZy0Q7BC

— WilliamThornton (@billineastala) November 14, 2017

In the second clip below, you’ll find Rush musing that child locks weren’t standard in cars until the 1980s, years after Nelson claimed that Moore had locked her in the front seat during his alleged assault. But Nelson never claimed that Moore used a child lock on the driver’s door. She said he parked, started groping her, and then “I tried to open my car door to leave, but he reached over, and he locked it, so I could not get out.” He locked it manually, supposedly. And if she’s telling the truth, she may have been in no position physically at that moment to reach for the button to unlock it.

Mitch McConnell’s reportedly leaning on Jeff Sessions to quit as AG and run as a write-in candidate for his old seat, as he may be the only Republican in the state with the name recognition and popularity to pull that off successfully. But Attorney General was Sessions’s dream job, his big opportunity to remake immigration enforcement. Despite the abuse from Trump, he seems uninterested in resigning. What now? Exit quotation from a Twitter pal: “Rush has a habit of supporting longtime Democrats who can’t keep their hands to themselves.”