VIRGINIA CLOWN SHOW UPDATE: Governor Blackface Brags about His Moral Compass and Explains How It’s All Our Fault.
When Virginia governor Ralph Northam agreed to his first print interview since his flaming dumpster fire of a press conference, he required the Washington Post to not post audio or a transcript of the entire interview, and the paper assented. (I thought democracy died in darkness.) Why does Governor Blackface think he’s in a position to make demands?
In the Post interview, Northam spoke as if the citizens of his state had done something terrible, and needed to make amends:
“It’s obvious from what happened this week that we still have a lot of work to do. There are still some very deep wounds in Virginia, and especially in the area of equity,” he said. “There are ongoing inequities to access to things like education, health care, mortgages, capital, entrepreneurship. And so this has been a real, I think, an awakening for Virginia. It has really raised the level of awareness for racial issues in Virginia. And so we’re ready to learn from our mistakes.”
What’s this “we” stuff? Northam added that he would take action to ensure that others would not be as insensitive as he had been: “First of all what I plan to do . . . is to make sure that we have sensitivity training — in our Cabinet, in our agencies. I also plan to reach out to our colleges and universities and talk about sensitivity training. Even into the K through 12 age range, that’s very important.”
Governor, Virginia’s kindergarteners are not the problem. You are.
Then Northam did a televised interview with CBS News, and declared, “Virginia needs someone that can heal. There’s no better person to do that than a doctor. Virginia also needs someone who is strong, who has empathy, who has courage and who has a moral compass. And that’s why I’m not going anywhere.”
You don’t get to brag about your moral compass when you’re in this situation.
In addition to all of the Oprah-approved language when a well-known leftist seeks media redemption — all that “healing” and “empathy” and “sensitivity,” historically, when a political lefty has screwed up royally, academia and the media have always given him an out on the basis that his crime or mistake is a collective failing among all Americans:
FDR’s decision to intern Japanese-Americans during World War II? America’s shame… JFK’s death in 1963, by a lone Capital-C Communist? America’s collective racist shame. In 2004, John Kerry tried to pass the buck on the Vietnam War from LBJ to Nixon. And on and on.
It was also a frequent tactic of former President Obama, as the late Charles Krauthammer perceptively noted in mid-2009, after Obama’s infamous “beer summit” with Cambridge police Sergeant James Crowley, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Joe Biden:
It was a classic example of the Obama style. Here, he starts out by making the mistake — he accuses the cops of acting stupidly. It’s an instinctive sort of a prejudice against the cops and in favor of a professor. If you’re a professor like him, if you live in academia the way he did, it’s sort of an instinctual response. He realized immediately it’s a mistake and what he does is he tries to act the philosopher or a king and he rises above it and he says, “and now we’re going to teach the nation,” whereas he was the one who made the mistake.
It’s the same way with the Philadelphia race speech [in 2008]. It was discovered of course in the campaign that he had had a gaffe of 20 years by being in the church of a raving racist, Jeremiah Wright. And then [Obama] gives a speech which essentially scolds everyone, including his own grandmother, of latent racism — except himself — and he rises above it. He says [it’s] “a teachable moment,” and he gives his speech that had the liberals feeling thrills up their leg and comparing it to Lincoln at Cooper Union. It’s a clever pose but I think it wears thin. [Obama] makes mistakes like others. They’re [the] usual instinctive liberal mistakes, and then he pretends that he’s going to now teach us about this. I found it slightly annoying and I wonder if the rest of the nation over time won’t also slightly annoying.
As with Obama before him, Northam has dramatically accelerated the process of casting off his personal guilt onto the populous at large. Though unlike Obama, Northam lacks the undying love of the DNC-MSM, which is why he’s running a much more personally high stakes game in the hopes that this tactic will save his hide.
At least as of today, it likely will — CBS is certainly going all-in to protect him, as a Hill headline this morning notes: “CBS’s Gayle King: Black people in Virginia don’t believe Northam is a racist.”
King’s comments come as a Washington Post-Schar School poll conducted last week found 47 percent of Virginia residents surveyed want Northam to resign, while the same percentage want him to stay.
Of the African-Americans surveyed in that poll, 58 percent said that they prefer Northam remain in office while 37 percent said they think he should resign. Forty-eight percent of white residents surveyed said they wanted Northam to resign, with 46 percent stating a preference to stay.
And as this Vanity Fair headline asks today, “Could [Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax’s] Sexual Assault Scandal Save Ralph Northam?”