Opinion: Letter to the Editor: ‘We Won, Principle Be Damned!’

Del. Ken Plum (D-36) exults in his Jan. 8 Connection opinion piece “General Assembly Session 2020 Underway” in his appointment as chairman of the Agriculture, Chesapeake and Natural Resources Committee, although some might consider the House’s longest-serving member to have been given somewhat short shrift by the Democratic Caucus, which, diversity in the ascendant, denied him the speakership, vaulting the fair sex over him. Still, he is to be congratulated. It has, indeed, been a while since Virginia’s Democrats controlled the Assembly.

What is considerably less meritorious is the total pass dished out by Mr Plum and his fellow Virginia Democrats to the odious blackface Governor Ralph “Coonman” Northam. It is hardly credible that Virginia’s “minorities” will be taken in by Klan-suited Northam’s transparent pandering and “atonement” – his confession of “incomplete understanding involving race and equity.” Well, that’s one way of putting it.

Apparently sufficient, now, though, for Mr Plum (“Governor Ralph Northam must resign”) and Virginia's Democrats (Senators Howell and Boysko included), whose earlier feigned outrage appears to have been very quickly assuaged. “We won, principle be damned!”

Harry Locock

Herndon/Reston