Before Northam, Democrats Didn’t Just Dress Up as Klansmen

[Geee]

American Spectator

When Virginia Governor Ralph Northam endorsed fourth-trimester abortions last week, nobody called for his resignation. His decision 35 years ago to masquerade, either in blackface or as a Klansman — which malefaction against taste Northam engaged in seems unclear — offends modern sensibilities to such a degree that his party, his predecessor, and nearly every presidential wannabe says he should step down. This says something more about us than him.

Democrats did not always exhibit a zero-tolerance policy toward dressing up in white sheets. They once, at least in some parts of the country, demanded it from candidates.

In 1924, the Democratic National Convention rejected, by a single vote, a resolution condemning the Ku Klux Klan. The nation’s most prominent Democrat, William Jennings Bryan, used his considerable rhetorical gifts to shamefully aid the nos. “My friends,” the three-time presidential nominee told the convention, “it requires more courage to fight the Republican Party than it does to fight the Ku Klux Klan.”

In 1937, before Supreme Court nominees received the Brett Kavanaugh treatment, President Franklin Roosevelt placed Hugo Black, a former Klansman, on the high court. A proto-Patrick Howley revealed Black’s resignation letter from the Ku Klux Klan, which he signed under an “I.T.S.U.B.” (In the Sacred, Unfailing Bond) complimentary close — a common, cryptic acronym favored by the secret society — after the Alabaman had secured his spot. Why did not Roosevelt use the Justice Department to investigate Black? The president reasoned that “a man’s private life is supposed to be his private life.” On the court, Black’s private views became public policy. Black authored the Korematsudecision. Klansmen have consequences.

[Valin]

Political Correctness Knows No Statute of Limitations

If Ralph Northam were to resign as governor of Virginia, it would be a great victory for the bullies of political correctness.

Joseph Epstein

Feb. 5 2019

The first time I heard the name “Ralph Northam” was earlier last week when he proposed what seemed a radically dangerous abortion scheme for the state of Virginia, of which he is governor. When I heard what he proposed, I merely thought, in the way of the political dilettante that I am, how likely this was to stir up the country’s pro-life forces, adding to the nation’s already high GDP, or Gross Divisiveness Product.

But, then, later that same week, when a putative photograph of Ralph Northam either in blackface or wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood taken from his medical-school graduation yearbook showed up, I began to feel sympathy for him. My sympathy increased as, on the news, I heard various people, many but not all of them African Americans, say that now that this photograph has been revealed Northam surely can no longer govern and must step down from his office as governor. Ralph Northam graduated from medical school in 1984, and so the photograph was taken fully 35 years ago. The incident reminded me that political correctness, for which Ralph Northam is the latest victim, knows no statute of limitations.

What may now be thought of as “the yearbook ploy” surfaced last year in the egregious Brett Kavanaugh hearings, where scribblings in Justice Kavanaugh’s high-school yearbook were used against him. The Kavanaugh hearings of course were not generally about Kavanaugh’s legal fitness for the Supreme Court but about his political correct- or incorrectness. (About whether, in high school, he was a sexual predator or not.) Why, I wondered when the opposition brought out a few obscure scribblings from his high-school yearbook, stop at high school? What about the grammar-school playground, where one might have an eyewitness for a fifth-grade student pulling a girl’s pigtails (an early act of sexism), or another witness might have heard a political candidate when in the third-grade say the “Eeney-meeny-miny-moe” poem (purest racism)? Or in preschool, the same candidate laughing after having fouled himself?

(Snip)

The aroma of goose-cooking brings us back to Ralph Northam. The gang up against him has been nothing if not impressive. After the original yearbook photograph was revealed, he claimed that he did not appear in it as either the man in blackface or the figure in KKK hood and gown. He did allow that, for a dance contest, in 1984, he dressed himself as Michael Jackson and used blackface as part of his get-up. It also somehow leaked out that his nickname in those days was “Coonman,” origin of the nickname in his case unknown. “Those days,” recall, were thirty-five years ago. That he has apparently been a strongly liberal governor cuts no ice with the political correctors.

(Snip)