The obligatory Ralph Northam presser post

The fates, in their impishness, have decided to encapsulate the two great defining leftist "principles" in one man this past week. Fresh off the talk-radio interview in which he horrified one swath of the nation and made another swath collectively face-palm (because of what he'd done to jeopardize its political aims) by putting infanticide out there as the endgame of what "reproductive health" is really all about, his 1984 law-school yearbook makes that latter swath have to come out once and for all and call for his ouster.

Delicious irony. It's not unseemly to grant ourselves a moment of schadenfreude.

But the irony is, of course, also tragic. Obviously, his first misstep should have been the deciding one.

But there was more fun to be had watching him end his own political career with his disastrous press conference yesterday. Twitter was full of real-time tee-hees about it. Yeah, that was me in the blackface-Klan costume photo. No, wait, maybe it wasn't. I know it was on my yearbook page, but I'm not sure. I do know I wore blackface to impersonate Michael Jackson in a dance contest around that time. I can't explain the "Coonman" moniker. My friends just made it up out of thin air, I guess.

Also fraught with delicious irony are the reactions of various Freedom-Haters each with his or her own baggage to reconcile:

Gov. Coonman’s fellow Democrats have been predictably shocked, shocked — not by his hysterical endorsement of infanticide, but by the ancient photograph. Naturally they piled on, because 10-on-1 is Democrat fun.

For example, after Northam’s victory in 2017, Sen. Kamala Harris had congratulated her dear friend by name “for showing that Virginia won’t stand for hatred and bigotry.”

That was then, this is now, 14 months later — “the stains of racism should have no place in the halls of government,” Willie Brown’s galpal thundered. “The governor of Virginia should step aside.”

I guess Kamala forgot his name.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren found the photo “deeply disturbing” — even more disturbing, apparently, than falsely claiming Native American heritage in order to game the system of racial preferences so revered by the party of Coonman.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, once accused by his estranged wife of “physical violence and (an) abusive nature,” likewise demanded Northam’s immediate removal from office for moral turpitude.

Ex-NY AG Eric Schneiderman, whose Sri Lankan ex-girlfriend said last year that he referred to her as his “brown slave” and slapped her until she called him “Master,” could not be reached for comment. Neither could those other moral titans of Democracy in the Empire State — Anthony “Carlos Danger” Weiner, locked up in the federal pen in Ayer, and ex-Gov. Elliot “Client No. 9” Spitzer.

Their political heir is Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who used to campaign with Bill Clinton and now that she’s elected says he should have resigned. True to form, this ethical cipher first declaimed of Northam, “I think he needs to apologize.”

Then, at 9:51 Friday night, after realizing that all her fellow would-be presidents were demanding his scalp, Gillibrand jumped on the bandwagon, better late than never:

“Having seen the photo, I believe Gov. Northam should resign.”

It took her until almost 10 last night to see the picture?

The photo is so damning that not even the most shameless of the alt-left media could mount a credible defense of their hero. Not even the Alibi Ikes of The Washington Post, which after the infanticide debacle in Richmond, ran a fawning puff piece on the female Democrat sponsor in the legislature, including three photos of her with her baby daughter, and at least six references to the fact that she has children of her own.

“Northam,” the Post pointed out, “grew up on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.”

Translation: He’s a redneck. He’s from the same area where in 2016 crooked FBI agent Peter Strzok claimed in texts to his married mistress that he could “smell” the Trump supporters at a local Walmart.

During Northam’s campaign for governor, the Post pointed out, “he paid special attention to black churches, often attending two or three services on Sundays.”

But not, presumably, in his traditional blackface or Klan regalia.

Ultimately, this whole thing is embarrassing for our nation, of course. But that seems to be a feature not a bug of 2019 post-America. What happens around this place that's not embarrassing?