Caution: Yearbooks Are Dangerous for Your Political Health

The Senate confirmation hearings on Justice Kavanaugh were a disgrace to American democracy. Political partisans have long since passed the line into no holds-barred political warfare. The end justifies the means. PERIOD. Seemingly anything goes. Justice Kavanaugh’s high school yearbook was placed under an electron microscope looking for definitive evidence that he was a sexual harasser in high school. His nomination survived Just as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s removal of the filibuster for federal judges came back to bite the Democrats over the first two years of the Trump Administration with judicial appointments, the Kavanaugh hearings are now biting Virginia Governor Ralph Northam. . We now know that as he was campaigning for Governor by repeatedly attacking Republican Ed Gillespie as a racist, Ralph Northam’s medical school yearbook was a ticking time bomb. He’s just another political hypocrite/hack who will say whatever to get elected. We now know that the politician calling a non-racist a racist had actually engaged in racist behavior. The picture in his yearbook under his name of a man with blackface standing next to another man in a KKK outfit blew up earlier today. He apologized today for the photo, but didn’t say which he was – not that it matters. A lot of high school and college yearbook photos, and captions, are ill-advised in hindsight and maturity. I wouldn’t give much credence to them, unless they are a forewarning of later behavior. People change; they mature; they grow up; they acquire a set of values. A lot of stupid behavior occurs in high school which is later regretted. This photo though is in a medical school graduation yearbook in 1984 when Dr. Northam was 25. It had to take deliberation to submit the photo. This photo was not an act of sophomoric humor by a pimple faced teenager. He had to know by 1984 at the age of 25, even in the Southern state of Virginia, that blackface and KKK are repugnant. He issued a statement as I wrote this blog that he will not resign. His governorship is dead if he stays in office, but he won’t. He was already in political hot water this week by endorsing a full-term abortion statute that could amount to infanticide. That he could survive. Not blackface and the KKK. The Democrats cannot use the racist card while one of them is a racist. Minnesota Senator Al Franken had to resign because of an old photo of the then comedian putting his hands on the breasts of a sleeping soldier. It looks bad. Whoever did the opposition research for Ed Gillespie and Governor Northam’s primary opponent is guilty of political malpractice. Yearbooks, old college newspapers, failed memories are now fair game in politics. You might be able to purge postings on social media, but not those old, faded, dusty, moldy yearbooks.