“That’s all I can stands, ’cause I can’t stands no more!”

—Popeye the Sailor, when he felt like I did while so many of my progressive friends were posting this op-ed by David Brooks.

Democratic posturing and moral outrage over Roy Moore’s support by Republicans is too much to bear. The hypocrisy and historical amnesia their caterwauling requires is truly nauseating. I could not believe that David Brooks of the Times would write about how the REPUBLICAN PARTY is rotting while the Democratic Party was wildly oscillating between defending a Congressman who had apparently harassed multiple staff members while in office because he was an “icon,” to playing the race card against its own Senator because he had been accused of conduct he denied years before he was elected, to dispensing with due process to demand that another Democratic Congressman resign, to forcing the Senator to resign (but probably only because their party controlled that State House), to forcing a vote on a shamefully contrived impeachment resolution, to all but guaranteeing the election of Moore because of revelations of the astounding sexual hypocrisy of their core allies among the news media, their key donors and their mouthpieces in Hollywood, while their bitter, losing Presidential candidate’s claim of a conspiracy to excuse her inexcusable defeat became less and less tenable as the investigation it spawned revealed itself to be incompetent and conflicted.

But the Republican Party is rotting.

Now, Ethics Alarms, unlike Brooks, unlike the Times, unlike MSNBC , unlike Hillary Clinton and unlike the Democratic party and any citizen so devoid of integrity to align with such a crew, can say the Republican Party is rotting. In fact, like Mr. Kimball would say on “Green Acres,” I will say it: the Republican Party is rotting. I can say it now because I said two years ago that it would commence rotting if it could not and would not stop Donald Trump from getting its nomination, something the party leaders had the power to do but neither the will nor the integrity. I said this, in various ways and with assorted provocation, right up to the convention.

Roy Moore? He’s minor rot, comparatively, and the Democrats don’t even honestly or competently argue what is most rotten about him. They want to concentrate on his “Deliverance,” hillbilly, low-life, dating preferences enabled by ignorant Alabama mothers forty years ago, when the man  today thinks he can defy the Supreme Court and the Constitution, thinks America was at its best under slavery, thinks women should be kept barefoot and pregnant, would love to see gays stoned to death, and wants a Christian theocracy to rule the land.

But that’s quibbling: Moore is certainly rotten, and the GOP doing anything but declaring him a human pathogen for the Senate and democracy is certainly proof of rot. Until, however, Republicans make Moore the keynote speaker in a future convention dedicated to condemning a “war on children,” I’ll handle the rot assessments, thanks, along with any other commentators, academics and citizens who didn’t spend the last, oh, half century or so extolling the likes of Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Teddy Kennedy, and the Clintons.

The Democratic Party has happily celebrated, covered up and profited from rot. As Obi Wan would say, “The Rot is Strong Within Them.” Thus they are estopped from calling out rot anywhere.

Brooks writes, hilariously:

“The Republican Party is doing harm to every cause it purports to serve. If Republicans accept Roy Moore as a United States senator, they may, for a couple years, have one more vote for a justice or a tax cut, but they will have made their party loathsome for an entire generation. The pro-life cause will be forever associated with moral hypocrisy on an epic scale. The word “evangelical” is already being discredited for an entire generation. Young people and people of color look at the Trump-Moore G.O.P. and they are repulsed, maybe forever.”

Oh, really? Funny, I don’t recall the Democratic Party being loathsome for a generation after it supported a Senatorial candidate who let a young woman die in a submerged car to protect his political career. Correct me if I’m wrong, David, but the negligent homicide of a campaign worker by a cheating married man—in other words, a Kennedy—is a touch less loathsome than feeling up a 14-year old,  or do you disagree? This same cowardly killer, whose freedom and reputation was bought and paid for by the First Family of the Democratic Party, was the hero to whom the Affordable care Act was dedicated: No stain there? Really? Not just a little bit repulsive?

The only reason playboy Ted was even considered Senate material,  of course, was that his brother was and still is the most admired Democratic President of recent vintage. I was just refreshing my revulsion by watching a documentary about JFK. He didn’t just cheat on his wife, though he did. He didn’t just intimidate young women and pass them around like sexual candy to other pols and celebrities, though he did that too. He had an affair with a mob moll while his brother was investigating organized crime. He had affairs with two women who were spies, one of whom was working for the Kremlin. More than once, Bobby threatened Justice Department harassment to intimidate journalists from ending JFK’s Presidency by informing the public.

But they all knew. Just as with Harvey Weinstein, the Democrats all knew. When they raised the money for a huge, gaudy arts center as President Kennedy’s memorial, they knew the kind of man they were honoring. Every time we see the broadcast of a Kennedy Center Honors ceremony, Kennedy’s disgraceful recklessness and serial degradation of women with the complicity of the Democratic Party is being rubbed in our faces. It’s just not so bad, because the news media still is enabling the lies.

Since 1960, the Democrats have been flying on wings forged by rapists, sexual abusers, liars, thugs and hypocrites. Has a whole generation rejected them yet? Compared to the Kennedys, Roy Moore is a Boy Scout.

Notice that I haven’t even gotten to Bill Clinton.  The Democrats are suddenly sounding like they read my posts about Bill from 20 years ago. There’s been no new evidence. As I was writing about why “personal conduct” in the workplace by a President is still professional misconduct, the Democratic Party was portraying this perv–is being proven to have used the power of the Presidency to persuade an intern to defile herself with a cigar less loathsome than allegedly molesting a teen four decades ago” Gee, let me think about that. I think it’s a close call—as just a victim of contrived conservative Puritanism. After all, it’s just sex! Sex is always good! Jerry Seinfeld said so!

David Brooks thinks the Republican Party will be loathsome for a generation because it didn’t block a perv from becoming a Senator for just two years (there’s another election in 2020), but the Democratic Party not only ignoring a President’s multiple sexual assault accusations of far more recent vintage than Moore’s, and then using that same smirking misogynist to promote feminist causes isn’t more loathsome? That same party running his beard, enabler and accomplice in intimidating her husbands victims and facilitating his avoidance of accountability as a Presidential candidate on a feminist platform—a feminist platform!– that demanded justice for the victims of sexual assault isn’t more loathsome?

I’ll listen to and respect those who were willing to call out the disgusting, cynical, corrupt conduct of

…Harry Reid (Harry on his deliberate lies about Mitt Romney: “Romney lost, didn’t he?”),

…Eric Holder’s racialist Justice Department, the Obama IRS, which perfectly read the desires of its leader to corrupt the 2012 campaign and then let Holder and House Democrats avoid a fair investigation, and

…The Clintons’ pocket-lining influence peddling while Hillary was Secretary of State, including accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from Russian interests.

Those fair and serious critics join me in saying the GOP is rotting, if they choose.  They’ve earned the privilege. But those partisan hacks who attack the other party as rotting while their own has been ejecting putrid, stinking hunks of dead flesh in all directions for half a century, right up to the present?

Uh-uh. No way.

I’ve earned the right to call the GOP rotten, because I and people like me have demonstrated that we are interested in truth, integrity, and good government, not partisan warfare. The others, like Brooks, and my friends who posted his screed on Facebook?

They are estopped from calling anyone rotten.

They have proven that they are rotten themselves.