"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."

That's the last line of Jonah Goldberg's column "Saving Roy Moore Isn’t Worth It."

It's hard to talk about the Roy Moore situation without including whatever preexisting bias you had about his impending election to the U.S. Senate.

Just yesterday, in the context of the racist graffiti hoax at the Air Force Academy, I was looking up the word "opportunism":

"Opportunism" is "The practice or policy of exploiting circumstances or opportunities to gain immediate advantage, rather than following a predetermined plan; the ability or tendency to exploit circumstances in this way. In later use esp. with the implication of cynicism or lack of regard to principles" (OED).

I understand using whatever you've got, whatever comes your way, when you're trying to defeat a political opponent. And when opportunities arise — like WaPo's "Woman says Roy Moore initiated sexual encounter when she was 14, he was 32" — they will be exploited for immediate advantage. And there's no plan going forward. You could never get everyone together on a plan for what's acceptable in bringing up allegations about something sexual that happened in private many years ago. How many years ago? How close to the election? Which sexual things? Is kissing and petting a 14-year-old worse than brutally raping a 35-year-old? How do we factor in a failure to report the incident to the police or to bring a civil lawsuit?

Can we at least agree — as an abstract principle — that the standard should be the same for everyone who is accused? Do we not have a foundation of due process — fairness — values? We need to treat Roy Moore the way we would want our favorite politician to be treated, right?

I'm afraid most Americans will say wrong. I think most of us want to look at everything, give everything whatever weight we want, including suspicions like Pizzagate, and let it all roil and seethe throughout our crazy little minds and then go vote. That's democracy. It's not a court of law. And anyway, those judges and jurors in a court of law are only trying (or pretending) to be rational.

Jonah Goldberg says we should just assume WaPo got it right — WaPo, which must want the GOP candidate to lose. He says:

Now, if you honestly think all of the people talking to the Washington Post are lying and that the Post somehow got them all to make this up, you have got one of the biggest stories of the century. If you can prove it, Roy Moore will end up owning the Post after his lawsuit.

Moore knows whether the allegations are true or not. He can withdraw if he knows they're true, but Goldberg says he should withdraw even if he knows the allegations are false, because he can make so much money in a defamation lawsuit against the Washington Post.

But Goldberg is only saying that because he thinks Moore is bad in so many other ways and because having to defend Moore will hurt the kind of Republicans he likes.

And Moore can't win that lawsuit, even if he knows the allegations are false. He's a public figure, and WaPo is protected when it publishes false statements, unless the plaintiff can prove that there was reckless disregard for whether it was false. The Washington Post was careful to make that impossible.  Goldberg knows that, I think, because he was cagey enough to write that Moore would have to prove that "the Post somehow got them all to make this up." That's a lot to prove! That's the point of the defamation law. The Post is not at risk putting this material out there for people to decide for themselves how to use.

Most people, I suspect, already didn't like Roy Moore and didn't want him in the Senate, but the question is what will Alabama voters do with it. We're talking about people who chose him in the primary over the more normal man named Strange. That's not easy to discern. People are strange.