
Originally Posted by
Nareen
I don’t know what CNN initially reported but by the time I heard about this story later on Friday evening, Northam was being identified on CNN as a Democrat and the condemnation from Democrats seemed universal. Any initial kneejerk defense by Democrats was done.
This guy has to resign. This incident happened in the mid 1980’s, not the 1950’s. Northam was an adult in his mid-twenties, not a kid pretending to be a bad boy to impress other kids. He was in med school, so he is pretty bright and should have been smarter than that, except that he was apparently a racist. What Northam did may not be illegal but it’s in the court of public opinion that he will be tried.
Northam may have done good things since then but he also did this and who knows what else. He pretends he doesn’t remember if he was the guy in blackface or the KKK outfit. So was this just one of many episodes of this kind? Is one costume worse than the other?
I agree that Northam’s opponents were petty inept not to find this. There are likely a lot of other politicians, on both sides, shaking in their boots about past sexual misconduct and casual racism. A Republican in Florida had to resign just a week or two ago over a blackface photo.
CNN’s commentary is very biased against Trump but its reporting is usually accurate or mistakes are soon corrected, as far as I can tell by comparing it to other international news sources. A story unfavourable or unflattering to Trump is not automatically fake news.
On the subject of fake news, I laughed when Trump said that his intelligence chiefs had not contradicted him in their joint reports to Congress about international threats to the US, and stories that they had were fake news. But the chiefs had testified on camera and in writing, and lying to Congress is a criminal offence. I saw a bit of those proceedings on television myself. It doesn’t matter if you agree with what they said or not – they said it and Trump is either delusional or lying about it. Apparently he thinks he can say anything and his base will believe it.
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