Some of the biggest champions for black people in America's past have been white politicians who were racists.Virginia is getting interesting.
The political crisis in Virginia spun out of control Wednesday when the state’s attorney general confessed to putting on blackface in the 1980s and a woman went public with detailed allegations of sexual assault against the lieutenant governor.So, different scandals have the possibility of making continuing in office untenable for the top three elected politicians in Virginia... care to guess who is #4 (or third in line of succession)? House Speaker Kirk Cox, a Republican.
With Gov. Ralph Northam’s career already hanging by a thread over a racist photo in his 1984 medical school yearbook, the day’s developments threatened to take down all three of Virginia’s top elected officials, all of them Democrats.
I smell some high-grade ratfucking going on. Very high grade.
Or, to put it another way: How convenient.
6 comments:
You gotta know that the GOP turned all this up during their opposition research before the election. So why did they wait so long before hauling it out? Baffling.
Driftglass said that it's blackface all the way down over there.
And here's the comment I left at that FN post:
Yeah, LBJ was, among other personality disorders, a racist. But he possessed a political skill that we haven't seen much of since then: he knew how to make the government turn out policy that helped people.
Molly Ivins noted that, before saying that he was also someone who could not have passed any character test ever devised by the human imagination.
But two things: First, this is not 1964, and as fucked up as race relations can be now, they still have progressed past how it was then, in no small part because of what LBJ managed to accomplish despite his flaws, and that is the baseline we operate from here in 2019.
And two, I'm not convinced that Ralph is of the caliber that LBJ was.
Time moves on.
I'm the only member of my immediate family who wasn't born in Ardmore, Oklahoma, and I'm the only male in my family who didn't grow up racist. So I have seen it right up close and personal: the otherwise mentally healthy men who for whatever fucked up reasons they have, believe that they need to denigrate people they don't even know because they look different than they do.
My father and my brother had what it took to lift themselves out of that way of thinking, for the most part, and while I admire what they did, I still would never have voted for either of them to be governor.
-Doug in Oakland
On the whole, this shows that politics is rapidly diving further into the gutter. While I don’t defend their actions (the black face, not the sexual assault), we are moving into a period where things you do/did are more recorded or memorialized. This is the tip of the iceberg, and neither side wil be immune to it.
We will move to accepting some youthful ”errors”, but it will be painful determining where and what those are...and it will take time. Until then, we will likely use these events to bludgeon opponents and then regret it when they are used to bludgeon our favorites. I do think that Donnie’s recorded “issues” offer some defense to others.
BadTux, if they made the information public, then it would have been the voter's choice. By waiting a few months after the election, they are now counting on the howling mob to do the job for them.
It's looking more like a coup d'etat by the likes of Roger Stone.
To some extent, the Democrats (and I'm a Democrat) have done it to themselves.
The zero tolerance policy makes no allowance for growth, reform, maturity, redemption, whatever the hell you want to call it. People do change. We seem unable to acknowledge that. (Although, in this case, the Virginia governor's shifting story would probably disqualify him on the grounds of his current behavior.)
All the same, the consequences of purity purges are negative. In Virginia, it probably means turning over the government to Republicans whose policies concerning education, election eligibility and other matters are essentially racist, even if they never put shoe polish on their faces. In the Senate, it has cost us Al Franken. Stay tuned. There's probably more to come.
I agree that we cannot condone, tolerate, put up with, ignore CURRENT racism or sexism. But I imagine the Republicans are chuckling to themselves, as if they were sitting in a movie theater, watching a film about lemmings running off a cliff and drowning themselves.
Yours very crankily,
The New York Crank
Now breaking, Virginia State Senator Tommy Norment (Republican Majority Leader) edited the 1968 VMI Yearbook, replete with blackface and slurs. Call me cynical, but the real fun is just beginning, and if you own a yearbook that has any current Virginia pol in it, you can probably charge a premium, especially if there’s something in there.
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