Headline reference. Reactions to this week’s nonsense with Virginia.
My former Representative, and Virginia’s two senators, called for that yesterday.
.I disagree. Ralphie is a horrible governor, and politician, that’s to be sure. There’s a reason why more than once I set out specifically to vote for his opponents, and against him in Norfolk Democrat primaries. (Norfolk has been a single-party city since the Northern occupiers left in the 1870s.) I do admit that that was more about his undergraduate stint at a state-funded military academy that didn’t admit women until twenty years after the Federal service academies. I also, professionally, cannot name a single Keydet I’ve worked with whose presence didn’t actually detract from the mission at hand….
But, no, I don’t think Ralphie is racist. I think he’s a typical well-to-do Virginia Democrat. Until very recently, proper admiration of the racist party overlords was required to advance.
You can’t just erase that history.
The statues the racists in Charlottesville were concerned about — those were erected by Virginia Democrats.
I almost said I can’t believe that there’s efforts to pretend otherwise. No, it makes complete sense. Erase the past completely, and maybe people won’t point fingers. Nope. Didn’t happen. There’s no record of it.
And even if there was a record of it, all of those racist Democrats, like Fritz Hollings from South Carolina, all became Republicans, right? Erected the Confederate flag over the South Carolina statehouse, went to the Senate, and switched parties.
Oh he didn’t switch parties? My mistake.
But parts of the party’s history, and personal histories of adults involved in it don’t disappear dow the Memory Hole, by just pretending that it never happened because it makes your party look bad.
(Yes, I have a legitimate excuse for whatever I did in 1984; I was a very young child.)
