That is, of course, ridiculous. Byrd functioned in other times and attempting some sort of gotcha bit derides both sides of the discussion. It shows a lack of effort and seriousness.
Now, onto something real. I heard about this on the radio yesterday and at first:
Huh. There’s some sort of problem with his yearbook. Survivable.
Uh oh. It’s in a picture he’s in. Blackface. Dang. Maybe some sort of idiot frat thing he was near. Not good, but OK.
He says he’s IN the picture. OK, that’s a…weird…disclaimer. But how bad could it be.
See pic. Well, he’s either the guy in blackface or he’s in the klan outfit. Damn. That’s it for him, then. At least that accounts for the weird ‘in the picture’ thing.
Not caring about past racist or sexist behavior is implicitly a partisan stance because it is the same stance as the Republican party. Perhaps you’re not a card-carrying member, but if you support what they support and attack what they attack, then that’s really a distinction without a difference. Nobody buys it.
Erick Erickson called out the left as a bunch of hypocrites for their silence about Northam at 5:34pm EST yesterday, when the story was still breaking, and nobody had really had time to comment in the minutes since it had been verified that this wasn’t a Photoshop job by a right-wing ‘news’ site.
A little over-eager there, Erick? :rolleyes:
Then he had to take a whole 'nother line on everything once essentially the entire Democratic world said Northam had to go. Why anyone takes this dipshit seriously is beyond me.
So maybe this wasn’t the first time he dressed up in blackface? It would seem to be quite a coincidence if he got such a nickname some other way, and the yearbooks would suggest that he was rather proud of both the costume and the nickname.
They Republicans are slow off the mark. I’m surprised nobody has come up with the unfalsifiable:
“If the Lt-Gov was a Republican, you wouldn’t force him to resign, so you are hypothetical hypocrites”.
See post 93 of this very thread, from the guy who says that a Republican racist would have been drummed out of office. Hilarious!
I’m not from Virginia and I’m a little tired of the Democrats having to keep a pristine house while racists, harassers, and philanderers in the Republican party continue on in their merry way, but ultimately I like that the Dems have a much cleaner house. So, I vote resign.
A question (not trying to make any point, just wondering):
What if he had done the same thing, but there wasn’t a photo of it? What if one of his classmates had come forward and said “I remember that time he dressed up in blackface, and went to a party with that other guy dressed in a KKK outfit,” and plenty of other people corroborated it? Same facts, but perhaps different emotional reaction without the visual. Would there be the same level of outrage?
I suppose then he might have claimed that he and a buddy stupidly improvised a costume one time while drunk, and he totally regretted it the next morning.
The peripheral circumstances in the actual case are much more serious indictments of his judgment and principles - and it’s not just the visual impact per se. It’s the fact that a lot of careful (sober) thought and design clearly went into these costumes; and in deliberately placing the photo in the public record in his yearbook he wasn’t even neutral about it, he was proud of it - after presumably having some considerable time to consider the matter. As a 25-year-old.