‘It just went poof…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The controversy over Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam‘s use of blackface and likely public deception—along with scandals by his top two successors, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax and Attorney General Mark Herring—has ended.
Or so decreed The New York Times.
In a recent postmortem analysis, a Times article puzzled over the fact that the defiant governor seemed to have outlasted any semblance of political resistance.
“It just went poof,” said the article, quoting a librarian that the journalist found sitting in a Richmond coffeehouse last week. “It’s like it never happened.”
The public Instagram feed of said librarian, Natalie Draper, leaves little mystery, though, about her own left-skewing political biases.
In fact, the shoddy reporting in the Times article may help to explain perfectly why the repulsive conduct of Virginia Democrats, antithetical to many of the Left’s self-declared core values, has fallen off the national radar.
It’s because the media tasked with reporting on it has willed it to vanish, with the guilty party more than happy to acquiesce.
The article quoted Democratic strategist Ben Tribbet, who said Northam’s refusal to accept accountability was the new normal in his party’s mindset.
“Don’t apologize, move on and everybody will talk about something else next week,” Tribbett said. “Maybe we’ve been doing it wrong over the last 100 years.”
Contrary to Tribbet’s claims, his party has been deploying the same strategy for at least half a century, since it helped Sen. Edward Kennedy ride out the negligent manslaughter of his young, female associate, Mary Jo Kopechne.
Kopechne’s 1969 drowning death at Chappaquiddick didn’t hinder the liberal Massachusetts icon from a lengthy Senate career and a bid for the presidency 11 years later.
The partisan double-standard again surfaced in the late 1990s, during the Bill Clinton impeachment, when the president’s sexual misconduct—and subsequent perjury—proved more of a political liability for Republicans.
But according to the Times version of events, it was President Donald Trump who initiated the political strategy of deflecting and stonewalling with his adamant insistence that he had not colluded with Russia.
Although Trump’s account was subsequently validated by the independent Mueller Report and congressional investigations, it flew counter to two years’ worth of Pulitzer-winning coverage from the leftist newspaper.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post also shilled for Northam and his stooges. Early in the developing scandal, it released a dubiously lopsided public opinion poll that disproportionately sampled Democrats, concluding that many voters—including a majority of blacks in the state—supported the embattled executives.
In its eulogy of the Northam scandal, the Times wrote:
- “Some say the whole mess was so exhausting and embarrassing that by the time the Legislature adjourned Feb. 24, the outrage had burned itself out. Others point to polls that showed Virginia voters were considerably less hungry for resignations than their representatives were. Some political observers mused about more fundamental changes to the life span of scandal, describing President Donald Trump’s approach to bad press as if it were a revolutionary medical breakthrough.”
A Political Change of Course
On Monday, sensing political fallout had been neutralized, Virginia’s most senior Democratic politician, Sen. Mark Warner, also hopped on the absolution bandwagon.
Warner, who firmly said in February that Northam should step down, has since qualified that demand and now expresses total confidence in the governor.
“He’s been very clear that he’s going to continue his term, and I hope he can do so successfully,” Warner told the Richmond Times–Dispatch.
“I think he’s going to be more successful when he lays out how he’s going to try to bring about a healing process here in Virginia,” Warner added.
Quoting a Democratic state legislator, the Times asserted that voters were eager to “move on” from the scandal. “They want positive things to happen, they’re concerned about the elections,” Del. Betsy Carr said.
But another Democrat it interviewed—in order to get both sides of the story, naturally—said that there needs to be more of a public reckoning.
“Winning is important,” said Taikein Cooper, chairman of the Prince Edward County Democratic Party, “but we also have to have some morals.”
Pandering and Extortion
Rather than accepting personal responsibility, to Northam and the Democrats, penance for the blasphemously un-woke conduct likely means three years of pandering to a radical leftist agenda—despite the governor’s having run as a moderate while, ironically, painting Republican opponent Ed Gillespie as a racist.
Northam acknowledged that part of his rehabilitation involved reading black liberation literature such as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2014 Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations.”
Moreover, as a condition of allowing the governor to remain in office with their blessing, one group of radicals, the Virginia Black Politicos, delivered to Northam a list of extortionist demands.
While some of the demands related directly to race-based issues—such as adding millions in funding to the state’s five historically black universities—others tied into things like environmental issues.
Not long thereafter, former Vice President Al Gore (whose father helped to filibuster the Voting Rights Act in the 1960s) appeared alongside black activists in Virginia to insist that the state block a major fossil-fuels pipeline from passing through a historically black community.
Another VBP demand was for the controversial ratification of the feminist/pro-abortionist-driven Equal Rights Amendment.
Prior to his racial controversy, Northam, a former pediatrician, already had generated negative headlines by embracing third-trimester, partial-birth abortions.
The governor shockingly said that even after birth it might be OK in some cases to kill an infant. However, Virginia Democrats’ infanticide bill was rejected by the Republican-led legislature.
Northam has made additional overtures pandering to some of the VBP radicals’ conditions, such as restoring voting rights of more than 10,000 convicted felons—which followed in the footsteps of his predecessor, Terry McAuliffe.
He also acceded to the VBP’s demands by vetoing a bill to fund additional school resource officers—following in the footsteps of former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who said school discipline disproportionately harmed students of color.
Should Northam, who is constitutionally limited to a single term as governor, pursue the more radical agenda items, there may be political fallout in this November’s elections of the Virginia General Assembly.
Currently, “Democrats have a chance to take back power in at least one chamber of the Legislature,” New York Times rosily said in its spin piece.
“That will be hard enough now, given the bales of fodder Republicans now have for attack ads,” said the Times. “But the idea of trying to raise money and hold rallies while spurning the three highest officeholders in the state came to be seen by many Democrats as just a needless handicap.”
Unless, of course, principles are a thing.
Hamstrung Opposition?
Should the state’s top three Democrats all have been ousted by their scandals, the governorship would have fallen into the hands of Kirk Cox, the Republican speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates.
However, some were quick to note Cox’s own tenuous grip on power. His GOP majority followed a contentious recount of one race that was solved by drawing a name randomly from a bowl.
In that race, Democrat Shelly Simonds had initially been declared the victor by a single vote prior to the challenge by Republican incumbent David Yancey.
Facing the transfer of the state’s top office into Republican hands under such extraordinary circumstances—not to mention the inevitable muckraking it would entail into his own background and that of other GOP legislators—Cox quickly ruled out a House effort to remove Northam from office over the blackface scandal.
“I think groups are struggling with, ‘What do we do?'” Cox told the Times. “‘What do we do about inviting him? Do we want him the centerpiece of an announcement?’”
Cox said a recent bipartisan bill-signing was the first time he had spoken with the governor since February. “It’s going to be pretty hard to say we’re just going to have a normal governorship for the next three years.”
Likewise, although Cox and others in the House have called for public hearings on the lieutenant governor over a pair of credible rape allegations, Fairfax has defiantly pushed back.
Despite the obvious parallels between his case and last year’s hearing for then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Fairfax, who is black, invoked racial rhetoric by likening the accusations to a public lynching.
Rather, Fairfax has insisted that any investigation happen on his exclusive terms, recently releasing a polygraph test through his attorney that he claimed proved he was telling the truth.
But regardless of whether state officials attempt to hold the leaders to account, Republicans can rest assured that the scandals will resurface in next year’s presidential election.
A few days into the scandal President Donald Trump tweeted his condemnation, expressing confidence that the corruption would help put the once-conservative state back into the red category.
Democrat Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia just stated, “I believe that I am not either of the people in that photo.” This was 24 hours after apologizing for appearing in the picture and after making the most horrible statement on “super” late term abortion. Unforgivable!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2019