11-15-17
Roy Moore says he’s a ‘witch hunt’ victim
Rounduptags: Salem Witch Trials, witch hunt, Roy Moore
By now, five women have accused Roy Moore of misdeeds, enough that the Republican Senate candidate can finally — without a whiff of intentional irony — compare his plight to the deadly persecutions of tens of thousands of women at the hands of delusional men.
Moore’s wife slammed the media organizations that have been reporting on her husband’s campaign on Wednesday, calling it a “Judge Moore Witch Hunt” on Facebook.
This followed a statement from Moore’s campaign that read: “This is a witch hunt against a man who has had an impeccable career for over 30 years and has always been known as a man of high character.”
A witch hunt, against a man.
Well, of course it was — who else but a powerful man would fall victim to a witch hunt?
We remember the “witch hunt atmosphere” that Woody Allen warned about last month, after women began accusing Harvey Weinstein and various Hollywood actors and directors of abuse.
Back in 1998, the supposed victim was President Bill Clinton, accused of bewitching a 20-something-year-old-old intern in the Oval Office.
“This isn’t ‘All The President’s Men,’ it’s ‘The Crucible,’ ” Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal told the Guardian at the time. He was referring to Arthur Miller’s play about an infamous case in 1692, when droves of men in Salem, Mass., were accused of witchcraft, rounded up and . . .
Wait, that’s not quite how the history went.
One summer morning in Salem near the turn of the century, six women were stripped naked in a dank jail cell. On a man’s orders, every inch of their flesh was probed and prodded, sometimes with needles, in search of what the learned men of the day referred to as a “witch’s teat,” as Stacy Schiff writes in her book, “The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem.” ...
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