Also known as slavery

This is the most memorable Black History Month ever, not for any good reasons.  To prove his press conference was no fluke, still-Governor Ralph Northam went on CBS this morning to teach a history lesson to Gayle King:  It was exactly four hundred years ago that the Virginia colony welcomed its first shipload of "indentured servants from Africa."  "Also known as slavery," King interjected (the pupil surpasses the teacher!).  The First Families of Virginia had a policy of "First, do no work."  They had unsuccessfully tried to enslave the indigenous people, who simply sloped off home when the grandees' backs were turned.  Then they imported white people (indentured or enslaved) from the impoverished parts of the British isles,  but they either served out their time and had to be freed, or ran away, frequently finding a home with the natives.  So, Africans, kidnapped, shipped across the ocean, easily identified by their skin color and unfree forever, generation after generation.  Come on, Ralph, you're the fucking governor.  Read a book.  If you have time for one disastrous media interaction after another, you have time for more than a couple chapters of Roots, which you say you've finally gotten around to.

Read more than one.  Black Virginians gave you your office and continue to support you by a significant margin, recognizing your efforts to secure voting rights for all, including former felons.  In no other "democracy" is there such a determined effort to keep people from voting, so this is a crucial battle.  Clearly you're a flawed and possibly crippled chief executive, but if the grim choice is between a racist and a rapist, well, at least the racist is belatedly trying to deal with his past.

As for the disloyal opposition, they don't even know how racist they are.  A former New York Representative named Nan Hayworth (R-Ofcourse) thinks this will hurt the Democrats because "They all have the Virginia tar baby to deal with."  Doo-dah.  If all Republicans did was pose in unfortunate face-paint, this would be a more peaceful country, but they just can't help resurrecting the most infamous racist of the last century.  Weeks after Steve King asserted that there's not a thing wrong with "white supremacy," Hitler has been invoked to attack Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Green New Deal proposed by her and Sen. Ed Markey, and socialism in general.  Candace Owen, who fronts something called Turning Point USA, told an audience in Britain (!) that Hitler was fine as long as "he just wanted to make Germany great again."  He only became a problem when he went globalist (which I thought was code for you-know-who) and tried to make the rest of the world equally great.  Tom Cotton, the Arkansas senator who formed his own State Department during the Obama administration, quoted Churchill about how "socialism...always ends with the Gestapo," failing to add that this was part of a 1945 campaign speech.  British voters chose Clem Atlee and socialism anyway; instead of concentration camps, they got the NHS.

We can have nice things, too, now that the spectre of Communism no longer exists to intimidate anyone to the left of Adlai Stevenson.   More Americans worry about China's economic power than its imperial ambitions or contempt for human rights.  Trump's big wet crush on Kim Jong-un has rendered the Korean dictator cuddly and harmless in the eyes of the Trumpanzees, and that leaves what, Cuba?  If Venezuela really were socialist, people would at least have enough to eat and a share in the oil revenues.  Under Maduro it's merely ineptocracy, a word I just coined.  I've been to the mountaintop, and I've seen universal Medicare, affordable college, appropriate taxation of the rich, paid maternity and paternity leave, renewable energy, and the long-promised infrastructure restoration.  I may not get there with you...