Cohen: Alabama, two centuries behind Washington

Alabama, Alabama, Alabama. If you want to understand why an accused sexual predator may become the state’s newest United States senator, blame Alabama.
It’s the place itself – miserable, misbegotten and messianic.
“Life here … was full, rich, original and real,” writes Rick Bragg in All Over But the Shoutin’, his lyrical memoir of growing up in Alabama in the 1960s and 1970s, “but harsh, hard and mean as a damn snake.”
His was not the gentee