Friday, March 29, AD 2024 1:49am

The Baby Butcher is a Racist Too

And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!
Lord Byron, The Destruction of Sennacherib

 

 

 

This was in his yearbook at Med School when he was 25.  Say goodnight Ralph.

 

 

Update I:  Seen online:

“Northam’s favorite movie was Partial Birth of a Nation.”

Update II:  You can always count on CNN for professional journalism:

 

Update III:  Northam has scheduled a press briefing for today.  I assume he will be resigning, but I would love to hear him stay that he intends to fight it out.  This is a legislative election year in Virginia.  The party of the Jackass is off to a grand start!

Update IV:  This is getting more amusing.  After initially admitting that he was in the photograph yesterday during his apology, Northam has purportedly told  colleagues today that he wasn’t in the photograph and he is not resigning.  Stick to your guns Ralph, at least until election day!  Press conference at 1:30 PM CST today sounds like the most exciting event in Virginia since Appomattox!

Update V: Press conference going on now.  Claims that he was not in the picture and that until yesterday he did not know what was on his yearbook page.  Yesterday he thought he was in the picture but now he believes that he was not.  Does say that around that time in 1984 he appeared at a dance contest in black face, imitating Michael Jackson.

 

 

Says he is not resigning.  (Thank you Lord!)  This reads like a Mad Magazine parody.  Now he is talking about racism in the history of Virginia in an attempt to divert attention from himself.

From his apology less than 24 hours ago:

 

“I am deeply sorry for the decision I made to appear as I did in this photo and for the hurt that decision caused then and now.”

 

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Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Friday, February 1, AD 2019 10:15pm

That meme about the media deciding what news to not report because reporting it would hurt the Democrats is no joke.

Wonder what all the tea year-book leaf readers at the WaPo and the NYT will make of that.

Dave Griffey
Dave Griffey
Friday, February 1, AD 2019 10:57pm

I will not go here. This ‘let’s dig up anything back to pre-K or earlier’ to destroy someone has got to stop. Woe be me if people dug up things from my college days. Plus, it plays into the ‘Racism: the sin even Jesus couldn’t forgive’ narrative of the moment. We have no idea the context, or who was in the photo (could it have been a white student doing blackface and a black student doing the KKK?, ala Blazing Saddles?). It was a different time (though even then, it likely would have been bad taste). We fall right into the Left’s hands when we do this sort of thing. It’s appalling that we’re allowing the Left to say, “Yes, it’s acceptable to go back and find anything from any point in person’s life to destroy them.” This is the good guys’ chance to shine and say, “Enough. We’re appalled at the bill of death that he supports, but we will not be sucked into this next step toward a gulag paradise founded on the idea that there is no mercy, only destroying political opponents by any means if they so much as make one mistake in life.”

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Friday, February 1, AD 2019 11:19pm

It wasn’t that different a time. In either ’85 or ’86 (memory fails, to be honest) a kid I graduated H.S. with in 1990 got into a boatload of trouble for doing a “blackface” (q.v.) sketch at a school pep rally.

It was a straight-up, no offense intended homage to Eddy Murphy’s “James Brown’s Celebrity Hot Tub” Routine from Saturday Night Live. Not that it mattered to The Powers That Be in the office.

In any event, from my p.o.v., this is about holding the Left to their own standard. They insinuated worse about Kavanaugh from his high school yearbook. Governor “Coonman” Northam was a 25 year old just about to matriculate from med school at the time this photo was taken.

I have neither pity nor mercy for him, as far as his political career is concerned. And neither you should you.

DonL
DonL
Saturday, February 2, AD 2019 5:24am

Not to butter up, but Amen (squared) Don

Art Deco
Art Deco
Saturday, February 2, AD 2019 6:51am

No Dave, we make them live up to the rules they apply to every one else.

Yes, but the ‘rules’ ‘apply’ because Republican poltroons like Kevin McCarthy buckle and truckle during these fake controversies. The commonweal doesn’t benefit when a state governor resigns because some jack-wagon caucus makes an issue over a 34 year old Halloween costume. The commonweal will benefit if Republican poltroons are sent packing.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Saturday, February 2, AD 2019 6:53am

What’s amusing is that uber-establishmentarian Ed Gillespie spent $29 million on the governor’s race and for all that dough his oppo researchers never located this photo. #fredocons

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Saturday, February 2, AD 2019 7:02am

It’s different when Democrats do it.

More karma? “I Kid You Not” Dept. “There I was . . . ” On winning the VA gov. election, Angel of Death Northam was congratulated for defeating (GOP) bias and racism.

Dems = undercover Confederates.

This Dem racism should be a topic for President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday evening, Even if Northam has quit.

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Saturday, February 2, AD 2019 8:37am

Donald wrote, ” At 25 I was a law school graduate and held strictly accountable for my behavior by the Illinois Canon of Legal Ethics, and I would never have been admitted to the bar if I had engaged in such behavior.”

At 25 years of age (1983) I was a nuclear training instructor at a commercial nuclear power plant. If I had engaged in Ralph Northram’s behavior, my a$$ would have been tossed out beyond the security perimeter fence to bounce on the concrete pavement of the surrounding sidewalk and never would I be permitted to work anywhere in the nuclear power industry. Therefore, I agree with Ernst:

“I have neither pity nor mercy for him, as far as his political career is concerned.”

Dave Griffey
Dave Griffey
Saturday, February 2, AD 2019 8:58am

Donald,
No, I disagree. Now, if he still acts this way, or this was something he just did, then yes, he should be held accountable. But even if this causes him to be thrown out, I fear it’s winning a skirmish, losing the war. After all, we’re now being told that:

1. Anything you ever did in your entire life at any point is fair game.
2. Racism is the unforgivable sin (Jesus tried, but you know…); the only sin the matters. It”s like the monster in The Thing remake: A single molecule touches you, and you cease being human and become a racist monster worthy of destruction.
3. Only white people can be racists (do we even remember the Black Hebrews of a week ago?),, any other combination or expression isn’t worth worrying about since, well, only white people can be racists and need to be dealt with as above.

Unless this is something that reflects him in recent years, if we go after him we affirm points 1-3. Sure, skirmish won. But imagine the next SCOTUS appt. Conservatives everywhere just said one’s whole life is now on the table, any violation of modern sensitivities is without mercy or forgiveness and should lead to career destruction, and if he’s white, good luck finding one not considered racist at some point in his life since we already say you can tell a racist by the color of someone’s skin (though I have no doubt that if any GOP candidate is Black or a Woman, the Left will be happy to make an exception).

Mary De Voe
Saturday, February 2, AD 2019 9:44am

DAVE GRIFFEY:
They did it with Kavanaugh. What makes you think that they will discontinue doing it? Fair is fair.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Saturday, February 2, AD 2019 10:19am

At 25 years of age (1983) I was a nuclear training instructor at a commercial nuclear power plant. If I had engaged in Ralph Northram’s behavior, my a$$ would have been tossed out beyond the security perimeter fence to bounce on the concrete pavement of the surrounding sidewalk

I’m remembering in surburban Rochester in 1975 being in costume with a buddy wandering about his neighborhood collecting candy from patient suburban householders. After we shlep back to his place, one of the men in his mother’s circle of friends shows up in a costume which was a great hit with these women. It was a Klan outfit. On the back, he had his wife had drawn a yellow smiley-face with a little dialogue balloon which said ‘Have a Nice Day!”

The notion that that man had committed some sort of unpardonable offense wouldn’t have occurred to us. Come to think of it, the notion that Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor were committing unpardonable insults to Black America wouldn’t have either. These ‘rules’ stoke artificial feelings with artificial language and are a means for obnoxious and self-aggrandizing people to engage in socially-sanctioned aggression.

The aggressors need to be told to go hang. I can appreciate the irony of the Democratic Party in Virginia being hoist on its own petard, of course.

One curio about this is Northam’s association with the Democratic Party. The vast majority of people with his background (small town, Southern, military) are Republicans and he’s admitted voting for Republican presidential candidates prior to 2008. This isn’t going to come up with most Democratic candidates because they’re minorities or they’re female or they grew up in subcultures whose outre humor has been deemed ‘acceptable’ by the media.

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Saturday, February 2, AD 2019 10:22am

Dave, you forgot about 4) 1-3 only apply to Republicans.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Saturday, February 2, AD 2019 10:30am

They did it with Kavanaugh. What makes you think that they will discontinue doing it?

What they did with Kavanaugh was to recruit a clinical psychologist whose only discernable connection to BK was period residency in his home county and (perhaps) a brief association with a young man then in his circle of friends to make up cock-and-bull stories about him. When that wasn’t quite working out for them, some of them went off script and recruited women to make even more incredible accusations while the cannier among them then shifted gears and tried to make an issue of his drinking habits ca. 1983 (and his ‘lying’ about his drinking).

There isn’t a whole lot of doubt about factual matters here (though there is about context). The question here is what interpretive frame you use and what it’s implications are.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Saturday, February 2, AD 2019 10:39am

Dave, you forgot about 4) 1-3 only apply to Republicans.

Yeah, well take a piece of advice from Eleanor Roosevelt: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent”. Street-level Democrats are modally fools voting for sociopaths. Walter Mondale is 90 years old. You want younger cohorts in the Democratic Party to extend the sort of courtesies competing politicians used to offer routinely, the answer’s going to be no for the next several generations. You can try to be the counter-Alinsky, but the first response ought to be to refuse to apologize, refuse to explain, and extend your upraised middle finger.

Anzlyne
Anzlyne
Saturday, February 2, AD 2019 10:44am

Why is it such a surprise to some people that a governor who is a supporter of Worse Than Murder is also racist!? Have people not connected the dots about the elitist racist attitudes that undergird mass abortions of poor black or brown babies

Nate Winchester
Nate Winchester
Saturday, February 2, AD 2019 10:52am

I’m torn here because the fact is I agree with BOTH Dave G and Don. I think both sides make fair & legitimate points, but I have no way to settle the dispute.

Indeed this kind of dispute is exactly what I had in mind when I wrote this article last month.

At the very least… I dunno. Maybe some kind of rules of engagement? Northam’s previous comments on racism does seem to make him a bit of fair game I think, though there is at least the possibility he can claim that he’s “come to Jesus” since then and reformed.

No, I’d like to see if he’s commented on Covington or Kavanaugh of late and what his comments are. If he fell in lockstep with the Left on those issues – then I say he is fair game. If he was against those instances, then likewise he should be shown mercy here and his past remain in the past.

Oh what’s this…
https://wset.com/news/local/sens-kaine-warner-announce-they-wont-support-kavanaugh-nomination
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam also tweeted his disapproval of the ‘message the Senate Judiciary Committee is sending to assault victims.’

No link to the tweet in question and if you do a search for that twitter and Kavanaugh, right now you get a deluge of results. But I consider this enough evidence that this time, Ralph is deserving of his punishment.

I’m remembering in surburban Rochester in 1975 being in costume with a buddy wandering about his neighborhood collecting candy from patient suburban householders. After we shlep back to his place, one of the men in his mother’s circle of friends shows up in a costume which was a great hit with these women. It was a Klan outfit. On the back, he had his wife had drawn a yellow smiley-face with a little dialogue balloon which said ‘Have a Nice Day!”

That’s from blazing saddles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nB1E0oAAc-w

Given that it came out in 1974, I’m betting your buddy was making a reference to that movie.

Nate Winchester
Nate Winchester
Saturday, February 2, AD 2019 11:02am

Oh this is interesting to…
https://theresurgent.com/2019/02/01/dems-defend-ralph-northam-sense-of-irony-hardest-hit/
But this isn’t a perfect world—as Democrats so potently demonstrated just last week, when the Florida Secretary of State (a Republican, of course), was forced to resign under pressure when blackface pictures of his own turned up.

I say the two parties should have to come to an agreement. If Northram stays, then Ertel gets to be reinstated. But if Ertel is to remain out of office, then Northram needs to go as well.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Saturday, February 2, AD 2019 12:16pm

Given that it came out in 1974, I’m betting your buddy was making a reference to that movie.

IIRC, my buddy was in cowpoke attire. The guy in the Klan outfit was one of his mother’s chums, who lived in that particular development. He’s likely pushing 80 if he’s still around.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Saturday, February 2, AD 2019 12:22pm

I don’t have to imagine it Dave, I know it will be worse than Kavanaugh.

They’ll want to make it that way. They’ll be missing a key ingredient crucial to making that spectacle so elongated: Jeff Flake.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Saturday, February 2, AD 2019 12:27pm

the two parties should have to come to an agreement. If Northram stays, then Ertel gets to be reinstated. But if Ertel is to remain out of office, then Northram needs to go as well.

It’s a reasonable inference that he was fired by Gov. Desantis and was allowed ‘resignation’ as a courtesy. He’s already been replaced and the current occupant is the wife of a state legislator. The Secretary of State in Florida is now an appointive position. Northam’s an elected official, not some local hack on patronage. The only people who fire him are voters.

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Saturday, February 2, AD 2019 12:54pm

Romney is the new Flake.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Saturday, February 2, AD 2019 1:02pm

Romney is the new Flake.

I’ll buy that when I see him playing similar stunts. I have a suspicion Flake’s conduct was a consequence of personal bitterness, something it’s difficult to see Romney stooping to.

Foxfier
Admin
Saturday, February 2, AD 2019 2:41pm

Yeah, it’s a stupid standard, and a distraction from him thinking infanticide is a nice, safe political position.

But they set the standard, let them choke on it.

Foxfier
Admin
Saturday, February 2, AD 2019 3:07pm

Agreed, Art. Romney has the “too nice” flaw, which can be a pain when you’re counting on him to stand strong beside you, but doesn’t go in for the pissy as much.

CAM
CAM
Saturday, February 2, AD 2019 3:21pm

Gov Gosnell at his press conference this afternoon is now denying he was in the black face/ klan picture; didn’t buy a yearbook; never saw his page in it til now; doesn’t know how that picture was inserted into his page, but does know that there were many occurrences of pictures being in the wrong place for that yearbook edition. He stated that he was Head of the Honor Committee at VMI [It is true that VMI has a stringent honor code similar to the federal service academies] and would never lie as he is a man of honor. {Infantcide is not honorable.] He does admit that in San Antonio he won a dance competition by impersonating Michael Jackson and mastering his Moonwalk. He also said he didn’t use much shoe polish on his cheeks for his black face because it’s almost impossible to remove. Oh and he is very sorry for that episode, and wouldn’t do it again because after discussing the his costume with an aide, who is black, he realized how hurtful it is to African Americans.

CAM
CAM
Saturday, February 2, AD 2019 3:30pm

I will give the Gov a pass on his high school or college nickname of “Coon Man”. First of all he didn’t choose it. I would guess most people don’t pick their nicknames. In Louisiana a pejorative name for Cajuns is Coonasses. People do hunt raccoons for protein and Cajuns do have a varied diet of game. I’m told it is a very greasy meat. Hunters shoot raccoons in Virginia and other states. Then there is Coon Hunters brand of sturdy rubber boots. Also Coon Cheese which is like a sharp Vermont or New York white cheddar and is very tasty.

Struggling Catholic
Struggling Catholic
Saturday, February 2, AD 2019 5:32pm

Additionally, this is not an incident involving some high schooler but rather a med school student of 25. At 25 I was a law school graduate and held strictly accountable for my behavior by the Illinois Canon of Legal Ethics, and I would never have been admitted to the bar if I had engaged in such behavior.”

People love to make lawyer jokes (and the best ones I’ve heard were told to me by lawyers), but after spending many years working, first, in 4 different law firms of differing sizes and then in healhcare, I found more MDs than JD were difficult and frequently churlish. I don’t want to overgeneralize, because most physicians I worked with were civil and professional and a few became good friends, and there were a few arrogant attorneys who abused the staff. But lawyers make their living with words; they must learn to use them carefully and precisely. In court, at least, they have to project courtesy and professionalism. Doctors – particularly surgeons – are judged by other skills. While everyone likes a doctor with a good bedside manner, a physician can be socially inept, arrogant, rude, nasty to staff and still be considered an excellent doctor. In my experience, lawyers who were terrors around the office did not advance professionally.

Dave Griffey
Dave Griffey
Sunday, February 3, AD 2019 7:21am

Again everyone, I’m standing on this one. What kind of a world are we giving our kids where they had best stay on the 100% perfect line or else – even decades later. Remember, in 1985 we hadn’t learned that racism was the unforgivable sin, that slavery was the Holocaust, and that anything offensive was hate that should be punished. These are all relatively new ideas (remember Ted Danson getting in trouble for going to a party in blackface in the early 90s? People were upset, but others defended him (including his then girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg). This ‘judge yesterday by our superior values today, never forgive, and if you did what we told you to do, well, we’ve change our minds, sorry about your luck’ is madness. The puritans were never this bad. If conservatives join with the Left in pushing him out will we have won a temp victory? Perhaps. But we just endorsed all of these ideas: America as Nazi, Slavery as Holocaust, racism the unforgivable sin (among a growing list), no time in life is safe, go back to the middle school locker room and dig up dirt – all of these things conservatives will have said, “We approve this message.” And the payoff is going to be far worse than anything gained by getting rid of one pol on the other side.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Sunday, February 3, AD 2019 7:35am

but doesn’t go in for the pissy as much.

He’s lived an abundant life. He didn’t get elected President, but he’s never failed at anything else he ever did and he’s accomplished a great deal in that time. No clue why he wants to spin his wheels in Congress. Flake has some assets, but his vocation has been ‘career conservative’, alas for him a career conservative the Republican voters of Arizona had come to despise.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Sunday, February 3, AD 2019 7:51am

Again everyone, I’m standing on this one. What kind of a world are we giving our kids where they had best stay on the 100% perfect line or else

He apparently attended a costume party or was cast in some variety performance. There’s no delict associated with that except in the inane and artificial moral world of the Alinskyite trash who dominate academe, the media, and the Democratic Party.

We live in a world where people improvising to get what they want will strike a pose in re someone’s late adolescent drinking habits (Brett Kavanaugh), citations for sub-misdemeanor offenses (Jeb Bush, Jr), or tacky adolescent amatory quarrels (George P. Bush). These complaints are 99% humbug. The offense we are discussing doesn’t even rise to the level of a disorderly conduct citation. It just happens to be the sort of nonsense offense that self-aggrandizing people invoke against others in campus settings. If Northam had eschewed in his campaign against Gillespie the rubbish discourses liberals use contra non-liberals, this would be a lot less amusing. Of course, he didn’t eschew them. Democrats (with the interesting exception of Bernie Sanders) have nothing left in their quiver but rubbish.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Sunday, February 3, AD 2019 7:55am

Dave, in 1984 only an idiot or a racist, or some combination of both, would have thought that it was a good idea to have a characters in blackface and in Klan regalia on your yearbook page.

Don, I was a post-adolescent Rustbelt city kid living in Baltimore in 1984. I voted for Walter Mondale. If I’d seen these pix at that time, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Sunday, February 3, AD 2019 8:04am

and wouldn’t do it again because after discussing the his costume with an aide, who is black, he realized how hurtful it is to African Americans.

It’s not hurtful at all to blacks. A great many blacks (particularly those involved in public life) are wretchedly status-conscious and have a neuralgic response to anything they fancy a ‘dis’.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Sunday, February 3, AD 2019 8:38am

Romney is corrupt, incompetent Hillary in a Brooks Brothers suit. He already is the “new Flake,” voting with Dems against President Trump. What is wrong with Utah and the Mormons?

Art Deco
Art Deco
Sunday, February 3, AD 2019 9:05am

Romney is corrupt, incompetent Hillary in a Brooks Brothers suit.

???

1. ‘Incompetent’ at what? What decayed or failed consequent to Mitt Romney running it?

2. ‘Corrupt’? In what venue? Romney doesn’t have any known domestic problems. There aren’t any Whitewater-like shenanigans in his past. And he hasn’t spent the last 17 years in an ongoing pay-for-play-cum-money-laundering scam. He never ran for public office until he was 47 years old and he never held public office until the age of 55. I don’t think anyone’s contended he was on the take while he was Governor of Massachusetts.

3. The real objection to Romney is that he’s a windsock, not that he’s a crook.

Struggling Catholic
Struggling Catholic
Sunday, February 3, AD 2019 9:44am

If Republicans can be condemned for 30 year old yearbooks than the same rule ought to hold true for Democrats. The left has determined that racism is the Unforgivable Sin and anything a person has ever said or done over the course of a lifetime can be used against him – so let us hold them to their own standards. I am very very tired of how the”rules” are only applied to one side.

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