Option 1: Mea maxima culpa. A full and complete accounting of the facts, and let the chips fall where they may.
Option 2: Resign.
Option 2 is probably the path of least resistance. What I’ve seen to date doesn’t even come close to Option 1.
I’m in favor of the concept of redemption. If he’s doing a good job now, according to the voters of VA, then stuff that happened 20+ years ago should be looked at as what it is. Youthful foolishness. It was very poor taste but it wasn’t criminal.
With cell phones, social media, and an eternal internet I think we should be a bit more nonchalant about decades old or even a decade old incident of jackassery.
If you were to judge me even by who was just ten years ago, you’d be looking at a completely different person. I’m embarrassed, regretful, and ashamed of some of the mistakes I’ve made just ten years ago! If I was fighting for what I believed in today with a new outlook, in a more mature and well-adjusted place, and somebody brought up some awful thing I did in my twenties, I’d feel deeply wronged. That’s not who I am today, that’s not what I stand for, and I distance myself from those mistakes completely, and have moved forward from them.
This is called being human. And our elected officials are no different.
And if you spoke so honestly about this before you were elected, I might well vote for you.
Well, exactly. They both did rude shit decades ago. One seems to have grown out of the insensitivity, and the other not so much.
If politicians have to recollect every affair, every off color joke or comment, every poor choice in robes and pointy hats we might be in for a long series of confessionals. Imagine if everyone’s internet search history was public knowledge. :eek::eek::eek:
This is Governor Post Birth Abortion’s?
Not the smartest is he.
Yeah, Kavanaugh was a douchebag kid who grew up to be a douchebag adult and lied about being a douchebag kid. Northam at least admitted (mostly, but without saying which person is him) to being a douchebag and offered an actual apology, not an I’m-sorry-if-you-were-offended fake apology. I lean toward thinking he should resign, but I see Northam and Kavanaugh as very different.
Recall that a few weeks ago, the Academy Awards chose Kevin Hart to host the Oscars this year. And shortly thereafter, he was dropped from the job due to some bad jokes on Twitter about homosexuality. And since then, they haven’t been able to find anyone to take his place.
If a certain job means having every stupid or offensive thing a person has ever posted online or made public anywhere else will be dragged out in public at great length, and then used to wreck one’s career, the number of people willing to do that job may suddenly drop. To zero, in some cases.
If the Democrats decide that every poorly chosen, decades-old joke by one of their politicians should be a career ender, they might likewise find that the number of people wanting to run for office as Democrats will decrease.
Slippery slope nonsense.
Perhaps it seems overly strict to you, but yes I do think any prospective candidate for high office should disclose to the voters every time they have shown such appalling judgment as to dress up in blackface and KKK outfit, pose for a photo, and be proud of the funny joke.
There’s a lot of hot takes out there, but this Twitter thread is worth your time.
It’s not slippery slope at all. People really aren’t thinking through the combination of eternal storage of video, text, and audio; global dissemination with social media; and demands for purity.
I don’t think it’s overly strict as it is counterproductive. If people don’t feel there is redemption, especially for something that’s just very poor taste and isn’t illegal, then you run the risk of people who decide it’s not worth the effort to evolve. It’s a bit like prison. Do you want prison to strictly punish and be a place for retribution or should it be a place for rehabilitation?
Now CNN supposedly listed the governor as a Republican. You know that was no accident.
Right, definitely not an accident. Because nobody has spotted it, their clever ruse has pulled the wool over our eyes, and now everyone believes he’s a Republican.
It probably was, when I saw the headline “Calls for resignation as VA governor apologizes for racist year book photo” I assumed he was a Republican. Republicans usually have all the ‘best’ racists.
We’ll see if CNN makes an on air correction or if they go the FOX News route and mention it on a web page somewhere or in some cases never make a correction at all.
I don’t care if it was over 30 years ago. That means he’s had over 30 years to apologize. Instead he ‘forgot’ about it or actively buried it. He’s only chosen to apologize after he was caught. He needs to go.
Might want to note that “supposedly”. I was just over on CNN’s website; where the story identifies him as “Virginia’s Democratic governor”, and the video of the story, in an image of his statement, shows him as “D - Virginia” Just where did you hear that he was “supposedly” misidentified on CNN, octopus?
Around second 17 in that video. Could be a Russian deepfake video though.
I was about to concede it looked genuine, and then I did a little more digging.
First off, the part you point to puts the misidentification right over what looks like his official title bit. Okay, maybe they do that, and mistakes happen.
Then, a bit further in at about second 51, the chyron correctly identifies him as (D) - Virginia.
I looked a bit down the page, where it says it’s “CNN Politics Network”, which sounded a little odd to me. Clicking on that will take you to this page, and then clicking the “About” button takes you here.
So, on balance, I’d say it’s a fake.
laughing at myself
After all that work, I had the bright idea to go to CNN’s actual YouTube site, and there it is, at about 40 seconds in.
Mea culpa, octopus, you were right.
Northam should still resign. 
So your prior news that the story about CNN’s fake news was fake news was fake news?