John Oliver drives a Roy Moore-sized stake through the heart of GOP cowardice on Last Week Tonight
On Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, John Oliver made mention of Monday’s rumored indictments in Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller’s quietly ticking investigation into that whole Trump-Russia thing. (“Please let it be Jared, please let it be Jared,” prayed Oliver in passing, anticipating, no doubt, some juicy footage of the son-in-law of a sitting president openly weeping and looking around for his unearned privilege to save him.) And, yeah, no doubt whatever happens on Monday is going to figure pretty heavily in next week’s Last Week Tonight, no matter who takes the first perp walk. But Oliver spent some time in his opening examining those Republicans who—while unlikely to be rung up by Mueller any time soon—have undoubtedly enabled a racist, irrational, hair-trigger dum-dum and his cronies to run roughshod over American governmental norms. To prove his point that, in order to secure those billionaire-boosting tax cuts that give big GOP donors their only Viagra-less boners, the Republican Party establishment is willing to abandon any semblance of “compassionate conservatism,” “constitutional conservatism,” or plain “not being hypocritical ghouls willing to sell out literally everyone not in a position to help them stay in power,” Oliver needed only to point to the candidacy of one Roy Moore.
Running for racist gremlin Jeff Sessions’ old Alabama senate seat, Moore is, as Oliver puts it, “a lot.” What with his penchant for dressing up as a cowboy, complete with actual, loaded gun at his campaign rallies, his references to different races by their stereotypical skin colors, and that time Moore suggested that 9/11 was God’s punishment against the rest of America for not being the bigoted old gasbag he is. Oh, and his stump speech poetry railing against “dumpster babies,” and when he said that Keith Ellison (D-MN), the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress, should not be sworn in because of his religion. Or, hey, how about his grimy public tendency to equate homosexuality with fucking donkeys. (Something he’s clearly given a good deal of thought to.) Or the fact that, as a justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, Moore was removed from office—twice—for putting his own cornpone, unconstitutional prejudices above the laws he was supposed to uphold. As Oliver notes, while Moore hasn’t actually kicked a panda in the nuts or “called Tom Hanks the N-word,” would you really be surprised if he did?