Virginia Vicissitudes: Northam & Fairfax (Oh, yeah, and Herring & Norment, too)
The first weekend of February 2019 wreaked havoc in the executive branch of the Commonwealth of Virginia. On Friday the 1st, the Democratic Governor Ralph Northam’s moral authority to govern was blown to smithereens by the release of a Medical School yearbook photo purporting to depict him in blackface, standing next to a hooded KKK clansman figure. At first, Northam admitted his fault, later retracting this admission, but copping to a “lesser charge” of having worn blackface during the same time period, when impersonating Michael Jackson in a dance competition. He was only dissuaded from demonstrating his version of Jackson’s trademark “Moonwalk” at a press conference by his considerably more level-headed wife, who whispered to him that these were “inappropriate circumstances” for such a performance.
So what’s behind all the drama about the crowd size for Trump’s inauguration? With the newly-minted president claiming it to be the largest ever, estimating it at “a million, a million and a half” (which in itself is a pretty broad range for an estimate), but the Parks Service suggesting it was closer to 250,000, a tempest in a teapot exploded over the new administration’s first weekend.