Bee Opinionated: Election results — still? + Theories abound + Gay community mourns again
We send Bee Opinionated to newsletter subscribers first. Get it in your inbox before it publishes online: Sign up here.
Robin Epley again with The Sacramento Bee Editorial Board, and hey — today’s my birthday!
Of course, that means my birthday usually falls on or around Thanksgiving, which is probably what you’ve been celebrating with family and friends for the last few days. I hope it was at least tasty, if not peaceful.
But you know what isn’t usually still happening by Thanksgiving? Waiting for Election Day results. The election was over nearly three weeks ago, and yet some California counties — including Sacramento and Placer — are still counting ballots.
Opinion
As deputy opinion editor Josh Gohlke wrote in a column last week, there’s a very good reason for this delay, despite what some Republican officials may tell you:
“California’s election results tend to emerge with all the speed of its sclerotic interstates, so each national vote brings a new round of puzzling over the reasons for the state’s long count,” Gohlke wrote. “At its worst, this discourse devolves into the lazy or pernicious assertion that the primary goal of tabulating votes is to do it as quickly as possible — and that any failure to instantly gratify the desires of politicians and pundits is evidence of incompetence or skulduggery.”
The loudest squawks have come from Placer County Republican Kevin Kiley, who perhaps expected to run away with the race in the Republican-leaning 3rd Congressional District.
“That it was too close for the Associated Press to call until Tuesday afternoon was an indication that it was not California but Kiley who underperformed,” Gohlke postulated.
It’s really as simple as this: The rise of voting by mail, which the state has made increasingly easy and voters have increasingly adopted, means a huge number of California votes are still trickling in — and we’re making sure every vote is counted before races are called, as we darn well should.
“California accepts ballots postmarked by Election Day as long as they arrive within a week, which means many valid votes aren’t even in the hands of officials until days after the polls close. The state also allows same-day registration, provisional balloting, correction of missing or deficient signatures, and redirection of ballots that turn up in the wrong county. And all of this is undertaken, by the way, in the most populous and third-largest state in the union,” Gohlke wrote.
“These procedures work against the speed of the tally but in favor of participation — and rightly so.”
The Grassy Knoll of American Politics
Bee editorial cartoonist and local presidential historian Jack Ohman wrote last week about the 59th anniversary of the John F. Kennedy assassination, tying the conspiracy theories that have abounded since that president’s untimely death in 1963 to the conspiracy theories that have so affected American politics and discourse in the last few years.
“During the 2016 primary campaign, (Donald) Trump blatantly suggested that Sen. Ted Cruz’s father was with Oswald in New Orleans shortly before the assassination. He wasn’t,” Ohman wrote. “Trump’s kissing-cousin status with the absurd “QAnon” theory, if you can call it that, led millions to fall for this silly and dangerous nonsense. It postulated that John F. Kennedy Jr. was the secret president in waiting, a sick and tragic punctuation of his father’s assassination.”
Something like 60% of Americans still believe Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone that day — and hi, I’m one of them — but Ohman argues that America’s love affair with crazy conspiracy theories has blinded us to the real threat behind the presidential desk.
If Trump’s followers weren’t so blinded by the former president’s “baseless, paranoid droolings,” Ohman wrote, then they might finally have time to examine “the former president’s actual conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government and his seeming approval of the assassination of his own vice president.”
“Don’t worry about Oswald,” he wrote. “Worry about Trump and his deluded monomaniacs. Fifty-nine years after Kennedy died, there is a legally provable conspiracy worthy of the country’s attention.”
Mourning in Colorado Springs
I wrote last week about the horrific tragedy of yet another mass shooting at a gay nightclub, this time in Colorado Springs.
But while the shooting was horrible, I doubt anyone in the LGBTQ+ community was surprised. We’ve always had to fight for our right to exist.
“Hatred against the queer community has been buoyed and encouraged by officials such as Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo. She has, many times over, accused the gay community of ‘depravity’ and of ‘grooming’ children,” I wrote. “This dangerous rhetoric, championed by former President Donald Trump, dehumanizes gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and otherwise queer people.”
Queer humans are humans first, and we deserve to live our lives freely and openly, without fear of death or retaliation for loving whom we choose to love.
“We are not depraved — we are beautiful and we are strong, and above all: We are resilient.”
Opinion of the Week
“This was the casino equivalent of not just hitting but doubling down on a hard 17.” — Josh Gohlke again, this time on how FanDuel, DraftKings and other online gambling moguls bet nine figures’ worth of their “dubiously gotten gains” this fall on Prop. 27 in an attempt to take over the lucrative California sports betting market — and succeeded only in losing their shirts to the house.
(Honestly, I could have picked about five different Opinions of the Week from this column alone — it’s chock-full of one-liner gems and a must-read.)
Got thoughts? What would you like to see in this newsletter every week? Got a story tip or an opinion to tell the world? Let us know what you think about this email and our work in general by emailing us at any time via opinion@sacbee.com.
Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday to meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, Happy Birthday to me!
Robin Epley
