…I stayed away from last week’s Roy Moore November Surprise, because I wanted to see all the evidence before making a decision. That’s something not everybody, including not everybody here at The Hayride, was willing to do, and while I’m happy to have differing opinions here I’ll confess I was uncomfortable seeing our own folks rush to judgement on the case.

And of course the political class on the GOP side, particularly in the Senate, has run away from Moore with their hair on fire. Even Mike Lee took a powder on supporting him.

Interestingly, though, it doesn’t appear the allegations that Moore is – or, more properly described, was – a serial pederast have been fatal. Breitbart News had a post last night detailing polling results from Alabama pollster John Wahl which indicated the numbers between Moore and his Senate opponent Doug Jones have barely moved.

The first survey, which was conducted entirely before noon local time on Thursday, shows Moore leading Jones by 50 percent to 39.2 percent with 10.8 percent undecided. That survey of 1,354 likely voters in the upcoming Dec. 12 special election has a margin of error of 3.5 percent.

The second survey, conducted Saturday evening—two days after the Post piece hit, roiling Alabama’s political scene—shows Moore and Jones with about the exact same percentages as before. Moore’s position in this second poll is 49.8 percent—meaning he only dropped 0.2 percent since the story hit—and Jones has only picked up 0.4 percent to reach 39.6 percent total. The second survey, which polled 1,536 likely voters with a margin of error of 3.3 percent, has 10.5 percent as undecided.

“The polling between Thursday morning and Saturday showed far less movement than I originally expected,” pollster John Wahl told Breitbart News. “The controversy surrounding the Washington Post article seems to have galvanized the support of both candidates, but not changed the actual percentages in a significant manner. The Moore campaign has already weathered a considerable amount of political attacks during this campaign season, and I expect most of his lightest support to have blown off during these attacks. His current support level is holding fairly steady.”

Wahl is a local Alabama pollster, based in the state, and is regarded for his accuracy in the state. The pollster’s firm, WT&S Consulting, did some work for Moore’s campaign in the primary and runoff—but these polls, Breitbart News has confirmed, were not commissioned by Moore’s campaign and were conducted independently. That said, WT&S Consulting nailed the runoff numbers accurately. Its last poll, the day before the runoff election, showed Moore crushing establishment-backed appointed Sen. Luther Strange 54.3 percent to 45.7 percent—an 8.6 percent gap. The final election results were 54.6 percent for Moore to 45.4 percent for Strange—or a 9.2 percent gap.

There are other polls showing a tightening of the race and it only makes sense the surfacing of those allegations would drain Moore of some of his support.

Which is, of course, the entire purpose of the story about Moore’s pursuit of teenage romantic interests when he was in his early 30’s some four decades ago being published. As the Moore campaign notes, and correctly, these allegations are some 38 years old and never surfaced through multiple political campaigns – not to mention this year’s primary and runoff races – until the Democrats believed that they had a chance to steal an election for a Senate seat in a deep red state they’re no longer competitive in.

The timing of these allegations trumps all. Plain and simple this is a November Surprise executed by the Amazon Post in an attempt to steal that seat and make it impossible for the Republicans to pass any major pieces of their agenda through the Senate before the 2018 midterm elections.

And that is a larger and more immoral act than what Moore is, not-so-credibly, being accused of.

There is only one accusation in the Amazon Post story which contains conduct we would consider thoroughly inappropriate, which is that of Leigh Corfman to the tune that Moore was sexually aggressive toward her when she was 14 and he was 32. The other women who have been named in the story said they went on dates with him when they were of legal age of consent and didn’t allege anything inappropriate other than that it’s said he gave wine to one of his dates when she was a year below the Alabama drinking age at the time.

And Corfman isn’t the best accuser in the world.

For one thing, she said Moore would call her on the phone in her bedroom, but her mother says she didn’t have a phone in the bedroom. For another, there is the relatively convenient accusation that Moore took her to a house in the woods in order to make out with her. For Moore’s part, he denies ever having met Corfman, which is different from the others named in the story.

Then there is Corfman’s personal history after what she says Moore did to her, which includes a host of financial problems and three divorces. Corfman said she never came forward with these allegations before, because she admitted that history would damage her credibility. Though she claims to be a Republican who voted for Donald Trump, it seems a bit suspicious that she would have held off making these charges during the primary or runoff when Trump’s endorsed candidate Luther Strange was running against Moore.

Roy Moore did go on dates with high school girls during that time. There is no denying that, and it is a very valid reason to be disconcerted by him. It doesn’t appear there was a pattern of inappropriate sexual conduct during those dates outside of what Corfman alleges. And Moore was considerably older than his wife when they married; he was 38 and she was 24, and she’d been a teenage beauty queen. We don’t know when he met her.

Frankly, I don’t like this stuff. You can couch it as Elvis and Priscilla Presley if you want, and you can note this happened in the 1970’s when society was a lot more accepting of the idea that a man in his 20’s or 30’s would take a young bride – hell, that was almost the norm just a generation or two before, and it’s the subject of every Jane Austen book they made us read in high school – but it’s still a little creepy even in the best of circumstances. For all the courage Moore has shown in taking stands against the Left’s constant cultural aggressions over the years what we know of these allegations makes it clear that Mo Brooks was the candidate who should have been the GOP nominee in Alabama. That was a blown opportunity and even if Moore wins in a couple of weeks this seat will be in tenuous Republican hands at best the entire time he’s holding it. If Moore gets elected and the Senate won’t seat him, or they expel him after a finding that these allegations are true, it’s really not going to bother me. Maybe that will allow somebody better – and hopefully better than Strange, who looks like an Establishment crook from my vantage – to get into that seat.

But I don’t have to like Roy Moore. I’m never going to meet Roy Moore, I’m never going to give him money, I’m never going to drink a beer with him and he’s never going to meet my kids. As far as I’m concerned Roy Moore is Alabama’s problem and not mine.

Doug Jones, the abortion-supporting socialist running against him, would vote to kill tax reform and the Obamacare repeal. Doug Jones would stand against economic growth, the preservation of Western civilization and the rule of law – and if he held that Senate seat his positions would quite often be dispositive of the issues at hand seeing as though his victory would give the Democrats, who are unquestionably the party of immorality in this country, 49 seats in the Senate. And Doug Jones’ theft of that Senate seat thanks to the Amazon Post’s November Surprise would make him our problem more than Alabama’s. That isn’t acceptable; what has been done here is a highly immoral dirty political trick.

What is more immoral? Allegations that, stripped of what look like gross embellishment by Leigh Corfman, amount to Roy Moore having hugged the line between an old-fashioned courtship strategy and the pursuit of jailbait before settling down into a 33-year marriage with no evidence of infidelity, or taxpayer-funded abortion on demand and transgendered troops in foxholes?

For me the Democrats are worse. I don’t have to like Roy Moore to see this for what it is and to reject it. That doesn’t mean I think it’s OK to put pederasts or sexual abusers in the Senate – though the people complaining about Moore were somewhat silent about Ted Kennedy, weren’t they? And where is the demand that Robert Menendez, he of the dalliances with teenage Dominican hookers, be expelled amid his corruption trial? – but this is about not rewarding political slime more than it is about those allegations.

Erick Erickson at The Resurgent was correct when he said this…

When a man is piled on top of by the press and his political enemies at the most opportune moment in the most convenient way to capture national attention and shut down the Bannonite rebellion you’re all opposed to, I think we need to slow down and ask if it is fair. And I’m not sure it is.

Roy Moore beating Luther Strange was, for me, all about fighting against Mitch McConnell. Whether Moore goes to the Senate or not, McConnell has been impacted in the way he deserves. But when I see a man who has been the target of both the left and Republican Establishment get attacked in this way and brought low so quickly with few mentioning the man has been happily, loyally married since 1985 and there is just one allegation of something illegal, unproven, unreported, but supposedly widely rumored from all the way back in 1979, I wonder if his enemies are railroading him with a willing press more than his sins are finding him out.