Virginia is for Lovers…of infanticide, racism, and rape. That would appear to be a more accurate state slogan. Or at any rate seem to be the hobbies of their top elected officials.
I was going to write this piece over the weekend. But held off because I didn’t want the story to get ahead of my analysis. When you right for a periodical, not a daily, that is an occupational hazard. So I waited, hoping Governor Ralph Northam wouldn’t resign before my piece was published. Thanks “Coonman,” as I think you’ll hang on until the end of the week, maybe longer. But a more enthusiastic thanks must now be given to Lt. Governor Justin Fairfax, who made the story of morally corrupt Virginia Dem politics so deep even tardy to the story pundits like me can still get enough words out of it to fashion a non-derivative piece.
Though if the governor does resign before this is published? C’est la guerre.
I’ll spare you the coverage you’ve already seen and read about. You already know what happened in the three stories that make up the basis for this analysis. Though I can’t help (I wish I could, really I do) making a comment on the abortive moonwalk. Just when you thought Ralphie couldn’t get any dumber, any more pathetic after clumsily changing his story in the space of less than a day, he comes up with this genuinely bizarre tale of blackening up to do an MJ impersonation. Then a journo asks him if he can still do the moonwalk and the poor dumb creature actually surveys the room to see if he has the required space to wax terpsichorean. Only the timely intervention of his wife saved the floundering idiot from making social media history. Also probably saved the life of an unknown Northam media flunky, who likely would have been looking for a reliable noose if the guv went ahead with his ad hoc dance recital.
All this at the opening of Black History Month. Yes, Virginia, there is a GOP Santa Claus. He just came a tad late this year.
To add on to the mixed blessing of Virginia almost becoming a Herod the Great-Approved vacation spot (“Come for the Scenery. Stay for the Butchery!”), the story of the dumb and rapey Dem duo at the top of the state political ziggurat is a strange one.
After all, when Ralphie’s now famous med school yearbook pic was published in 1984, no one thought blackface was cool. So there goes his “all the popular kids were doing it” defense. Granted, there were earlier lapses in cultural judgment. I remember cringing when watching one of my favorite holiday films, 1954’s “White Christmas,” (yes, I see the joke in the title) as they do the minstrel number. It’s past creepy. It’s so graceless it makes “Amos ‘n Andy” look like a diversity training film. I doubt the badly tanned for the number Der Bingle, Danny Kaye, Vera Ellen (so cute), and Rosemary Clooney (so hot) were Kluxers. But I guess the studio didn’t think the public would be that offended. Sadly, perhaps then they weren’t.
I also remember from my early 70s South Florida childhood going to a restaurant called, I swear I’m not making this up, “Sambo’s,” replete with a decor that defied offensive imagination. My pre-adolescent mind wondered if there was a trend towards ethnic and racial slur-themed restaurant chains? Would I soon be eating at the alliteratively branded “The (horrible name for Jewish people) Kitchen,” munching lunch at “The (really bad name for subcontinent Indian people pertaining to their facial cosmetic habits, also alliterative) Deli”?
So we could understand a little wiggle room up to a certain point. But by ’84 that was over. Ralphie knew what it meant and he let it pass anyway. And you know, he may not have been a racist at all. However, he definitely was a Klu Klux hustler of the moment and circumstance. He knew that he would be considered a downhome good ‘ol boy in some circles by making the blackface/Klan joke. It was a marketing ploy to fit in, a hustle. Just like his many years of slavish devotion to all things loved by the hard left is merely what he thinks will improve his standing with his target audience, i.e., spittle-spewing Bolshies and devotees of Moloch.
He really doesn’t know what to do now because he isn’t operating from any core beliefs. Guess his VMI undergrad education didn’t take hold. So he’s hoping he can hold on just long enough for the heat to die down from his usual media allies and for the news cycle to move on. Then he goes barking mad, giving Old Dominion commies more than they ask for at every turn, praying they eventually leave him alone. Nationally? Forget it. He’s toast. I still think he’ll be gone soon. But resignation as a certitude? I wouldn’t bet the whole farm on it just yet.
Same deal with Fairfax, though he’s more of the opportunist hustler ilk, as opposed to Ralphie’s long con. Fairfax probably thought, as an Edwards (what a nonsurprise) campaign staffer at the 2004 Dem convention in Boston, he could have his way with any woman because he was so entitled a woman would be daft to report him even if things got a little rough.
Sad for Justin that he was about to grab the big state office by lucky default when this hit. Here he can’t play the race card —his accuser is also black— and he finds himself in a political environment where the vast majority of his fellow Dems just spent an absurd amount of time and effort invested in the proposition that all accusers must be believed.
Bad timing, Mr. Wannabe Guv.
This is all delicious schadenfreude and just rewards for a party that is obsessed with race and pervy sexual topics of all natures. Not to mention poetic justice for a party that weeps copious crocodile tears for children temporarily and safely separated from their irresponsible parents at a border, but who can’t find a millisecond to consider the plight of children who could be brutally executed without reprieve just before their birth.
Infanticide, racism, and rape. The current motivating factors of the Virginia Democratic Party. But maybe they can soon get back to the powerful messages of national importance and ground-shaking gravitas that to them make their current troubles seem small by comparison.
I mean, there must be at least one Confederate statue still standing to make a fuss about.
