So, why did the photo appear now and who released it to Big League Politics, a right-leaning website?

The incendiary yearbook photo of Ralph Northam in (pick one) blackface or KKK robes should have come out during his campaign for Governor of Virginia, but didn’t. Unless the campaign manager Chris Leavitt was actively sabotaging the campaign (which I doubt), we can assume that the photo didn’t come from it.

The first step is to ask the famous Latin question, “Cui bono?” “Who benefits?”

It is pretty clear to me that the abortion industry and its political handmaidens were desperate to change the subject from a physician advocating terminating a life after birth as part of the push by states to legalize just about anything that kills a baby anytime before it is sent home from the hospital. This is because there is genuine fear that the new majority on the Supreme Court will modify or eliminate Roe v. Wade’s blanket federal approval, and send the issue to the states.

Vermont already is considering an even more radical permissive abortion bill than New York’s. Attention to Northam’s position can only hamper the progress of this effort. So, it is pretty clear that the self-interest of abortion advocates would make them want to change the subject. And what better way to do that than throw out this picture?

Carol Brown writes:

Well this is rich. Planned Parenthood is demanding that VA Governor Ralph Northam resign after it was discovered that he’d posed in KKK garb back when he was in medical school. Breitbart reports on a statement from PP: “There is no place for Gov. Ralph Northam’s racist actions or language,” Dr. Leana Wen said in a statement emailed to reporters. “He must step down as Governor.” Right. OK. We can’t have racists advocating for the murder of babies about to be born. The left has such a crazy set of “morals” one cannot make head or tail of them. Infanticide and the dismemberment of babies is a woman’s right, but border walls are immoral and medieval. Sure. Whatever you say freakish ghouls.

As she and M. Catharine Evans realize, it is grotesque to be more outraged over an insensitive racist photo than actual advocacy of infanticide. But the level of outrage over the photo has successfully drowned out discussion of infanticide, and Vermont and other state legislators can safely ignore Northam’s declaration of principles because he is becoming a non-person, someone to be dismissed as irrelevant. This is why he must be driven from office, in the interest of his own party.