Ross: Why are school yearbooks suddenly fair game?
Feb 11, 2019, 7:13 AM | Updated: 7:16 am
Brett Kavanaugh testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 27, 2018. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, Pool)
(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, Pool)
So why are school yearbooks suddenly fair game?
In the Brett Kavanaugh hearing, critics went back to a 1983 yearbook to find what were described as horrible comments about women, which his accuser saw as corroborating evidence for her allegations.
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In the case of Ralph Northam, governor of Virginia, what we have is a picture in a yearbook from 1984 that he at first thought was him in blackface, then he realized it wasn’t. At which point he admitted to an apparently undocumented blackface incident.
It all makes you wonder — if you examined everybody’s yearbook from the ‘80s, would anybody be left to run the government?
But then I realized it’s very time consuming to go paging through old yearbooks. There would need to be a very strong motive to want to exploit youthful indiscretions.
And it so happens that in both these cases there was a powerful motive. The same powerful motive.
Brett Kavanaugh’s ordeal happened not just because of his beer drinking, or an assault allegation, but because of the fear he’d overturn Roe v Wade. Ralph Northam is in trouble not just because of blackface, but because of a comment on a radio show that made it sound like he would radically expand Roe v Wade.
Had it not been for that, I’m pretty sure we’d know exactly nothing about the college partying habits of either one of them.
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