Not too long ago, I listened to Rachel Maddow’s “Bag Man” podcast, about the fall of Spiro “Ted” Agnew. While his fall occurred against the backdrop of Watergate, it was an unrelated scandal involving taking bribes in exchange for getting contracts from the government, and it was apparently one that started at the county level and continued up from there, following Agnew wherever he went, but continuing where he had been, and investigations into the lower levels led back to him and took him down.
After I listened to that podcast — but of course completely unrelated to that — Virginia developed a series of problems in the executive branch. First, the governor’s medical school yearbook (I did not know there was such a thing — people in the Future will likely say that about MySpace and SnapChat) was publicized because it included a picture of two white men, one in blackface and the other in Klan robes, ha ha ha, yukking it up 80s style. Goddess I do not miss the 80s. There is some back and forth about whether or not that was a picture of the governor (and, if so, which one was he? Which one would you _want_ him to be? Unanswerable questions, probably! Hopefully, anyway). As this scandal was breaking, I talked to people. People said, duh, he should resign. I was like, let’s not be hasty. Let’s make sure there isn’t a problem with the Lt. Gov. first. I mean. Agnew.
Wow, did that turn out to be prescient.
The Lt Gov then developed a little sexual aggression problem. That has since mushroomed into a rape problem involving more than one woman coming forward. I don’t know a thing about it, but I will observe that while blackface, klan robes and consent issues in an intimate context are all Bad Bad Things and no one likes to rank the Bad Bad Things, let’s just go ahead and say that having two women come forward and say that you violated them sexually is at least potentially prosecutable, whereas wearing blackface and klan robes is not. Maybe wearing blackface and/or klan robes _should_ be prosecutable (I could go either way on this one), but currently, here in the US, not prosecutable.
Now, you might go, but who is Speaker of the House, or, in this case, the Attorney General, who is apparently 3rd in line for the throne, er, Governor’s seat. Which, I might add, is still occupied, because Northam’s wife seems to actually have a pretty good handle on how all this shit works, and the governor seems to be listening to her, so I don’t think he is stepping down any time soon. No matter what Democratic Senators — white, black, male or female — might have to say about what he should do. (Any doubts I had about who is doing the decision making for the Governor were clarified when I watched him defer to his wife’s judgment about whether he should actually moonwalk during the press conference or not.)
Anyway. 3rd in line understands how this works — he _is_ Attorney General, after all, and he piped up immediately that he, too, had a blackface problem from the 80s.
Goddess I do not miss the 80s.
Larry Sabado, meanwhile, has egg all over his face for poo-poohing the idea that this was somehow all a Republican operation, because, look, it is Democrats through the top 3 levels. Ha, ha, Larry.
Meanwhile, I am gobsmacked. I mean, I was clearly right to want a hard look at the succession before continuing. And there are circumstances where you have to pitch someone, no matter how bad #2 looks (Eliot Spitzer really couldn’t stay after those revelations, despite what turned up in the news conference with his Lt Gov, soon to be Gov).
I get that everyone needs a nice steaming hot mug of outrage to get motivated these days. Don’t let that tasty, tasty outrage blind you to the consequences of your decisions.
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