Seth Meyers takes a closer look at Roy Moore.

Seth Meyers Methodically Demolishes the Idea That Republicans are the Party of Law and Order

Seth Meyers Methodically Demolishes the Idea That Republicans are the Party of Law and Order

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Brow Beat
Slate's Culture Blog
Dec. 7 2017 1:40 AM

Seth Meyers Methodically Demolishes the Idea That Republicans are the Party of Law and Order

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Seth Meyers.

NBC

The Republican party’s willing embrace of Roy Moore, a man who has been credibly accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old (and preying on other teenage girls so openly he was reportedly banned from a local mall) is such an easy slam-dunk for late night hosts, the only thing better would be living in a country where a major political party didn’t support child molesters. Jimmy Kimmel ate Moore’s bullshit “Christian values” shtick alive, Stephen Colbert pointed out how morally bankrupt the Republicans are on the issue, the Daily Show interviewed the rancid Alabamians supporting him (this was back before the rest of Moore’s party endorsed the sexual assault of 14-year-old girls). The details are so disgusting and vile that it’s understandable that, for the most part, no one has pulled back to look at the bigger picture. But the big picture is Seth Meyers’ specialty, and in a blistering segment on Wednesday, he methodically showed how the Republican embrace of Roy Moore puts the lie to their claims of being the party of law and order:

Trump says he wants to stop crime, but he’s backing an accused child molester over a prosecutor who convicted the KKK, which tells you that when he uses the word “crime,” that’s not what he really means. He doesn’t want to stop “crime,” he wants to stop immigrants, refugees, or his political opponents.
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It’s a smart angle to take—though it’s certainly not the only Republican lie Roy Moore’s campaign inadvertently exposes—and Meyers goes as far back as 2015 to show then-candidate Trump’s flexible relationship with crime, law enforcement, and the truth. He builds a strong case that Trump and his party are evil men doing evil things, which will, of course, make no difference to the evil people supporting them. But despite the essential pointlessness in calling out Republican hypocrisy, it’s also some of Meyers’ funniest work: he does a loopy reading of a Trump tweet as a beat poem, then pivots to a totally different character with a sort of His Girl Friday cadence. The timing is great, the jokes are funny, and the whole thing exists only because, again, the Republican party is giving political support and campaign dollars—including money raised by Meyers’ home network of NBC—to a man who has been accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old. You gotta laugh, right?