He can’t quite bring himself to deny having dated underage girls.
.. Roy Moore’s reputation depends on denying that he dated teenage girls as a grown man, and yet he can’t quite bring himself to do it. The Alabama Republican’s campaign for the Senate has been rocked by allegations of sexual improprieties with underage girls. While he’s denied the worst of the allegations, he turned in a rocky performance in an interview with radio talk-show host Sean Hannity that lent credence to the charges against him rather than dispelled them.
The alleged conduct dates back 40 years, and absent some difficult-to-imagine documentary proof, it will always be Moore’s word against that of his accusers. In this contest, Moore’s word is clearly the loser.
.. Moore hasn’t done himself any favors. In the Hannity interview, he first said, referring to Leigh Corfman and the other women in the Post report, “I’ve never known this woman or anything with regard to the other girls.” Then, in almost the same breath, he conceded, “I do recognize however the names of two these young ladies.” Oh.
.. Of one of the girls, he said: “I don’t remember going out on dates. I knew her as a friend. If we did go on dates then we did.” How many men in their 30s are “friends” with teenage girls who they may or may not have dated? Then Moore said of these two girls, “neither of them have ever stated any inappropriate behavior” — even though both of them said he dated and kissed them.
.. Asked point-blank if he dated girls in their teens, he replied with the less than Shermanesque “Not generally, no.”
.. Either several different women who don’t know one another have decided to take the enormous personal risk of making up stories about Roy Moore in a vast political conspiracy, or a politician caught up in a scandal with every incentive to dissemble is doing it — and not very well.