Samantha Bee dares Alabamians to prove "Yankee assholes" like her wrong by rejecting Roy Moore
Airing only once a week, Full Frontal With Samantha Bee has both the handicap and advantage of playing catch-up on the week’s events. On the one hand, if—just to pick a crazily improbable example—a Republican senate candidate who’s already infamous for gleeful, atavistic bigotry is also revealed as a likely lifelong pedophile, all Samantha Bee’s late-nightly colleagues have already taken their swings. On the other, it gives Bee extra time to come up with some more trenchant takes other than simply screaming “What the living hell, Republican Party!? Jesus clod-hopping Christ, you can’t do better than this?! I mean, seriously!” So sort of a glass half full/empty situation there.
Well, on Wednesday’s episode, Bee led off with her take on Alabama Republican candidate, disgraced former judge, rampant homophobe, equally rampant Islamophobe, gun-waving old stereotype Roy Moore. After multiple women came forward, in the Washington Post and then elsewhere, to claim that Moore pursued sexual relationships with them when they were as young as 14, the national GOP has largely, pretty much, eventually, sort-of disavowed Moore. (Although there are rumblings that they’re mulling a destined-to-be-ruled-unconstitutional “Whoopsie, we nominated a pedophile” election do-over.) But, as Bee laid out, the Republicans in Moore’s purported schoolyard-stalking grounds of Alabama aren’t so quick to hop off the statutory rape bandwagon, with state GOP officials, supporters, and other apologists wheeling out everything from the biblically unsound example of Jesus’ parents, to “it doesn’t count because Moore was only, like, mid-thirties at the time,” to that old right-wing standby, the international Jewish conspiracy in the media, to forestall the unthinkable alternative of a qualified Democrat representing their state.
Playing the comically inept “New York”-accented robocall making the rounds in Alabama (from cartoonishly fictional Washington Post reporter “Lenny Bernstein”) who promises that any further allegations against Moore will be immediately printed but not in any way investigated, Bee mocked the community theater quality accent, which she described aptly as sounding like “the Penguin fucked Fran Drescher.” (Or #FakeJews, as Bee labeled it.) But, as Bee noted, this is 2017, and America’s divided nature is exemplified by polls showing that Moore’s support among self-described evangelicals in Alabama has actually solidified in his run against Democrat (and not, as press time at least, alleged sex criminal) Doug Jones. Still, Bee threw down the gauntlet for Alabamians to show up those out-of-state liberals like her. Noting that the deadline to vote in Alabama’s December 12 special election is Monday, November 27, Bee exhorted residents to make all those elitist, northern, Ivy League, latte-sipping, condescending jerks (like her) look so stupid by voting against the Bible-thumping hypocritical old bigot who apparently trolled the local malls and football games for underage victims. That’ll show ’em.