Who’s Afraid Of Virginia?

Happy Confederate History Month, everyone!

Poor Virginians. Just 13 weeks into the term of their new governor, Bob McDonnell, Virginia has become the laughing stock of the country. I just want to let everyone know that it wasn’t their fault.

First, a little background. Mr. McDonnell was sworn in as the governor of Virginia on January 16th of this year. During his very short tenure as governor, he has reversed (by executive order) non-discrimination protections for gay state workers that were put in place by former governor Tim Kaine. The next item on his agenda was to proclaim that April would be “Confederate History Month” in Virginia. You can read the proclamation here. Did you happen to notice anything missing from his “celebration” of the confederacy? Whoopsie, he forgot all about that whole slavery misunderstanding. He finally apologized for his little memory lapse yesterday.

So far, Bob McDonnell’s thirteen week tenure as governor can best be summed up as an increase of discrimination and celebration of bigotry. Such a proud moment for Virginia!

As I said earlier, this situation isn’t the fault of Virginians. They didn’t vote for this. Bob McDonnell ran as a moderate whose primary focus for Virginia would be job creation. Here’s a Time Magazine article on McDonnell’s campaign from last November. Here’s another one from The Washington Post. He didn’t run as a far right winger whose focus was going to be to stir up hate and bigotry, which tells me that he knows that he couldn’t get elected to the position of dog catcher if he ran under his real agenda. He pulled a complete bait and switch on Virginians because he knew that they wouldn’t have him if they knew who he really was. In my opinion, he’s shown nothing but contempt for Virginians by playing them for fools.

If you really believe that what you’re doing is good for the people in your state, you would run on that platform. Lying about who and what you are says two things to me;

1) You don’t believe your own bullshit on any sort of intellectual level.

2) You know that you can’t get elected by the people because your views are not widely shared.

In short, Bob McDonnell is a viscerally hate fueled coward. You’re a coward, Bob McDonnell because you were too chicken shit to show the voters who you are so that they could make an informed decision about whether or not to vote for you. And your hatred is so viscerally entrenched in who you are, that it’s completely suppressed any rational thought that you may ever have.

I say that because Bob McDonnell gave the rebuttal to President Obama’s state of the union earlier this year, which is a very clear sign that he and republican leaders had national aspirations. Those aspirations have evaporated in the twelve weeks since he made that rebuttal. There’s NO WAY to get elected to national office on an anti-gay, pro-confederacy record. Buh bye, Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Any rational person regardless of ideology can tell you that you can’t win a national election with a record like the one Bob McDonnell is creating. His hate for blacks and gays has blinded him so completely that what was a bright political future a few weeks ago, is now a distant memory.

Bob McDonnell fucked himself and he fucked Virginia.

But don’t go hating Virginians for this. They didn’t know although admittedly, he had a pretty questionable background going into the election. Unfortunately, his opponent was a terrible campaigner and the Obama administration were too cowardly to support him. Thanks for that, Rahm I really appreciate it!