Sen. Tim Kaine (D., Va.) and other drivers who got stuck for nearly 30 hours in a snowstorm-related traffic jam outside Washington, D.C., have only themselves to blame, Gov. Ralph "Coonman" Northam (D., Va.) told reporters on Thursday.
Northam said he was "sick and tired" of being asked to explain "what went wrong" regarding the massive backup on I-95 between Richmond and the nation's capital earlier this week. "Why don't you start asking some of these individuals that were out on the highways …? Why did you feel it was so important to drive through such a snowstorm?" the outgoing governor huffed.
Kaine was one of those individuals who thought it would be a good idea to drive through the storm on his way to Capitol Hill. The senator and failed vice presidential candidate posted about the ordeal on his Twitter account. "I started my normal 2 hour drive to DC at 1pm yesterday. 19 hours later, I'm still not near the Capitol," he wrote on Tuesday and included a photo of the highway gridlock. He would end up spending "27+ hours on the road" before arriving at his office.
Northam, who is best known for refusing to step down after admitting to wearing blackface, must have known that Kaine was among the stranded drivers. Perhaps the implicit insult of the senator's intelligence was payback for the time Kaine demanded Northam's resignation in the midst of the blackface scandal in 2019. In fact, numerous Democrats urged Northam to step down after a racist photo from his medical yearbook surfaced that features one individual in blackface and another in a Ku Klux Klan robe.
"The events of the past 24 hours have inflicted immense pain and irrevocably broken the trust Virginians must have in their leaders," Kaine wrote at the time in a joint statement with Sen. Mark Warner (D., Va.) and Rep. Bobby Scott (D., Va.). Northam "should step down and allow the Commonwealth to begin healing."
Northam powered through, and eventually Kaine and all the other Democrats who had called for his resignation just started acting like the scandal never happened. The blackface governor, who was not eligible to run for reelection in 2021, will be succeeded by Republican governor-elect Glenn Youngkin on Jan. 15. The fact that a Democrat is still in charge did not prevent a bunch of angry libs from trying to blame the Republican for the I-95 traffic fiasco.