Why You’re Not Hearing That Ralph Northam Was Smeared

By throwing Ralph Northam under the bus, the Virginia Democrat
Party is trying to erase its leading role in Massive Resistance..  The hypocrisy is truly breathtaking. 

Some readers may be tired of hearing about the firestorm in Virginia - much of it fueled by inside the Beltway pundits  and right wing "news" sites - but as a close fiend of Governor Northam and his wife, I cannot sit back and quietly watch the political assassination underway.   While Northam was first smeared by a far right website, far too many Democrat elected officials have jumped on the bandwagon to make it difficult to feel that some sort of dirty deal has been cut between elected officials and the Black Caucus in the Virginia General Assembly. I am so livid that I am considering a run against either my member of the House of Delegates or State Senator both of whom are members of the Black Caucus.  I last ran for office 25 years ago and swore I;d never do it again, but with these very low turn out elections, such a campaign might just be doable.  But I digress.  A piece in Slate looks at why Northam may be unfairly being savaged by the media and social media.   What the piece leaves out is (i) evidence exonerating Northam, and (ii) the fact that the Democrat Party in Virginia has a very ugly racist history that it now pretends never happened.  Massive Resisistance - where public schools were closed down rather than integrate - occurred under Democrats, not Republicans.  By crucifying Northam, the Democrat Party of Virginia is trying to rewrite history and erase its own ugly history of racism which pales compared to anything Ralph Northam might have done as a student.  Northam, in fact, wasn't even born when Virginia Democrats developed Massive Resistance.  Here are article excerpts:

When mainstream media outlets reported on sexual assault allegations against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Republican politicians and conservative media outlets said he’d been the victim of a left-wing “smear job.” When the same outlets covered a viral video of Covington, Kentucky, high school students facing off with a Native American protester near the Lincoln Memorial, Republican politicians and conservative media outlets said the same thing. . . . There are similar open questions about some aspects of the scandal into which Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam has gotten himself. Last Friday, news broke that a photo on Northam’s medical school yearbook page showed two individuals at a costume party, one in blackface and one dressed as a member of the KKK. Many Democratic politicians and left-wing commentators called on him to resign. Subsequently, though, some of Northam’s medical school classmates have said they don’t remember Northam in those get-ups, and that it’s technically possible the picture could have been put on his page by mistake.

And yet, we’re not hearing much about a “smear job” when it comes to Northam.

The difference between the reaction to Northam and the reactions to Kavanaugh and Covington is pretty easy to spot: Northam is a Democrat. Despite not every detail of his situation being locked down, we’re not hearing about this story as a smear job because, for reasons including identity, ideology, and coalition-building necessity, Democrats and pundits on the left aren’t looking for ways to worm out of confronting racist and sexist behavior. Northam’s peers in his party and his movement aren’t invested in proving that all such accusations are fraudulent, and centrist media figures haven’t been made self-conscious about criticizing people like him by years of bias accusations.

Perhaps an even more important article is this one.  Read the entire thing.