Jonah Goldberg: “I am one of those naïve fools who actually believed that the conservatives who often talked the loudest about the supreme importance of character were sincere. The last two years disabused me of that.”

“But just as a matter of cold realpolitik, I cannot grasp why so many people think it’s a good idea to stand by a man who, if elected, will serve as a negative campaign ad made flesh. I get the argument that it’s a ‘binary choice!’ But it’s a binary choice now, because a bunch of people who want to see the GOP burn down made it one. In the long run, a Senator Moore would cost Republicans more seats than the one he might give them. He’d be an albatross for every elected Republican, including President Trump, who will be asked to take a side on every scene in the clown show Moore would bring to Washington. And every conservative who ever denounces a Democrat for immoral behavior or insane views will be asked, ‘Oh yeah, why did you support Roy Moore then?'”

“Saving Steve Bannon’s reputation as the leader of some (doomed) movement certainly isn’t worth it, not for the cost to the GOP not to mention your own souls.”

Roy Moore (R) “sent a fundraising email Thursday afternoon asking for donations to combat the ‘Obama-Clinton Machine’s liberal media lapdogs,’ hours after the Washington Post published accounts from four women who said that Moore pursued relationships with them when he was in his 30s and they were teenagers,” Politico reports.

Said Moore: “The forces of evil will lie, cheat, steal — even inflict physical harm — if they believe it will silence and shut up Christian conservatives like you and me.”

The email then asks for an “emergency contribution” to Moore’s campaign.

Embattled Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore (R) told supporters “that he would not back down amid calls for him to step aside from the race following a new report that accuses him of inappropriate sexual conduct with a minor in 1979,” The Hill reports.

Said Moore: “I refuse to stand down.”

“Take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus. There’s just nothing immoral or illegal here. Maybe just a little bit unusual.”

— Alabama state auditor Jim Zeigler (R), quoted by the Washington Examiner, defending Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore (R), who is accused of initiating sexual relations with teenage girls.

“Senate Republicans moved swiftly to distance themselves from their party’s nominee for Senate in Alabama on Thursday after multiple women accused him of inappropriate sexual conduct when they were minors—including one who said he molested her at the age of 14 years,” the Daily Beast reports.

“Within hours of a Washington Post story reporting the allegations against Roy Moore, a former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, the Senate’s top GOP lawmakers called on Moore to withdraw from the race, albeit with a caveat.”

Weekly Standard: “The allegations spell potential disaster for Republicans in Alabama, as it is likely too late to field another candidate even if Moore were to step aside immediately.”

Axios has a running tally of statements from Republican lawmakers condemning Moore.

“Leigh Corfman says she was 14 years old when an older man approached her outside a courtroom in Etowah County, Ala. She was sitting on a wooden bench with her mother, they both recall, when the man introduced himself as Roy Moore,” the Washington Post reports.

“It was early 1979 and Moore — now the Republican nominee in Alabama for a U.S. Senate seat — was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney. He struck up a conversation, Corfman and her mother say, and offered to watch the girl while her mother went inside for a child custody hearing.”

“Alone with Corfman, Moore chatted with her and asked for her phone number, she says. Days later, she says, he picked her up around the corner from her house in Gadsden, drove her about 30 minutes to his home in the woods, told her how pretty she was and kissed her. On a second visit, she says, he took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes. He touched her over her bra and underpants, she says, and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear.”

Axios quotes Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell: “If these allegations are true, he must step aside.”

“Mr. Moore, I have been teaching in this school for thirty years, and in all of that time you’re the most mixed-up person I’ve ever taught. I’m going to call you Fruit Salad.”

— University of Alabama law school professor Clint McGee, quoted by the New Yorker, when first meeting Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore (R) as a law student.

Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore (R) once said that he did not take a “regular salary” from the charity he founded to promote Christian values because he did not want to be a financial burden, the Washington Post reports.

“But privately, Moore had arranged to receive a salary of $180,000 a year for part-time work at the Foundation for Moral Law… He collected more than $1 million as president from 2007 to 2012, compensation that far surpassed what the group disclosed in its public tax filings most of those years.”

“When the charity couldn’t afford the full amount, Moore in 2012 was given a promissory note for back pay eventually worth $540,000 or an equal stake of the charity’s most valuable asset, a historic building in Montgomery, Ala., mortgage records show. He holds that note even now.”

“Now, I’m going to tell you about the only thing I know that the Islamic faith has done in this country is 9/11.”

— Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore (R), quoted by CNN.

Jonathan Chait: “The Republican Establishment has suffered through the Trump presidency, filling the news with a constant stream of caustic, mordant, off-the-record comments attesting to their sense of regret. The presidency is exactly the chaotic shambles the Trump campaign was, and the legislative results are much less than his party hoped to win when it made its pact with the devil. The nomination in Alabama of Roy Moore for U.S. Senate offered the party a chance to reconsider whether the prospect of supporting the team, and the incrementally higher prospects of enacting some tax cuts and social spending rollbacks, is worth the cost of elevating a dangerously unhinged demagogue for public office. The entire party, without any apparent hesitation, is leaping at the chance to make the same deal again.”

“Moore is hardly a carbon copy of Trump. He is religious where Trump is secular, fanatical where Trump is cynical. But he shares the president’s two most pertinent attributes. First, Moore is a purveyor of paranoid conspiracy theories, such as the belief that Sharia law has taken hold in American communities, or that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Second, and more distinctly, he is not a small-d democrat.”

“There are communities under Sharia law right now in our country.”

— Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore (R), quoted by Vox.