I turned to a friend the other night and asked, “Doesn’t California have a recall election every other month?” The truth is that this is only the second gubernatorial recall effort to proceed, though they’ve had lower office ones as well. What I hadn’t remembered is that the last one produced so much overwrought and overreported horseshit that it made it seem like the state does this on a regular cycle.
The last recall election gave us Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor, and we couldn’t know at the time that Arnold would turn out to be one of the last kinda sane Republicans we would ever see. This recall election is giving a platform to Caitlyn Jenner, because these things always have to have one candidate that validates what everyone who has never been to California thinks about California.
Jenner was all to happy to jump on the latest Republican Hey-Look-Over-There issue, which is transgender athletes, saying transgender girls competing with cisgender girls is “unfair.”
That’s why I oppose biological boys who are trans competing in girls’ sports in school. It just isn’t fair. And we have to protect girls’ sports in our schools.
Five states thus far have implemented laws or executive orders to put limits on transgender athletes, pretty much only to make an issue up so it looks like they’re doing something about it when it was a nothing to begin with.
Again, as we’ve stated, reported, and written again and again, there is no evidence that transgender athletes dominate girls’ sports in any remarkable fashion. Do some of them win? Sure. Do some of them lose? That too. Much like any other group of athletes you choose. This is not a thing.
16 years ago, it was gay marriage. George Bush the Younger and Slightly Dumber (though less handsy) didn’t have any answers on real issues that actually affected people’s lives, and was in the midst of two wars he was fucking up royally that costs hundreds of thousands of lives in total that the media and Ellen DeGeneres have just forgotten because he’s not as bonkers and stupid as the next Republican in office. So he and his team concocted a culture war on gay marriage because he knew it would stir the base up just enough to beat the cardboard candidate the Dems had tossed up, in this case John Kerry. It was holding up something liberals love and are using to destroy the society you love, so the story went, and the furor of opposition for the sake of opposition to anything like that was just enough. Bush’s base didn’t have to understand it, they just had to hate it because it was a liberal cause.
But of course, gay marriage is now a part of everyday life, or at least far more than it was back then, and shockingly Nebraska hasn’t turned into a giant sinkhole (though the Nebraska football program sure has, hasn’t it! Up top!) So the right has to find something else to hold up as a target that they can claim righteousness on something their base just doesn’t understand and doesn’t want to, because they don’t have any answers on how to make anyone’s life better. So transgender athletes have become the diversion.
It’s disgusting and hateful and nakedly ignorant, but that’s where we are. Why anyone wants Jenner to comment on anything, much less even be anywhere near governing the state, is a mystery. But then again, logic packed up its bindle and stuck a thumb out of this place long ago.
There were a couple of slapstick baseball games yesterday. First in Cincinnati, where the Cubs and Reds combined for 10 home runs but the Reds won 13-12 in 10 innings when Craig Kimbrel gave up a single. Because that makes sense. Time travel!
Meanwhile the weekend capped off with another sign that the Mets might not even be able to “Mets” this season when they appeared to have blown a four-run ninth-inning lead as Edwin Diaz performed his art performance interpretation of Three Mile Island. Rhys Hoskins thought he had hit a three-run homer to tie the game, but a replay review showed (maybe?) that the ball had hit the top railing of the wall and bounced back into play.
Hoskins wasn’t thrilled with the reversal:
The Mets used the break to perp walk Diaz out of the game and perp walk Jeurys Familia into it, and he promptly struck out Bryce Harper to end the game which assuredly won’t be something Phillies fans cite at the end of the season when the Fightin’s are 80-82 again.