Summary: As happened in 2016, so-called hardline supporters of Independent Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders have been uncritically and unquestioningly availing themselves of the Trump campaign narratives against Bernard Sanders political rival Joe Biden. Their favorite Trumpian trope is that Vice President Biden, who suffered from an appalling stammer/stutter as a child, is somehow losing his marbles. Coming as it does the supporters of one verbally challenged septuagenarian from Queens and easily and uncritically repeated by the followers of another septuagenarian with a Brooklyn accent so thick you can cut it with a knife, such allegations are risible at best and more than a little bit contemptible.
Los Angeles County registrar of voters Dean Logan ought to be fired. The abysmal pig’s breakfast that Los Angeles County inflicted upon us voters by eliminating neighborhood precincts in favor of so-called boating centers goes a long way toward demonstrating that not only are the old ways frequently the best ways, but that the worst possible time for trying to roll out new voting technologies is in the midst of one of the most consequential primaries in recent California history. A pilot project in, say, West Hollywood or Beverly Hills, would have exposed the glitches and not left nearly so many people as were disenfranchised cut off from the vote. Logan should not only be fired, but his metaphorical head should be stuck up on a pike outside the county Hall of Administration.
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The Berniebros, or as Vice President Biden referred to them more politely, and with a certain delicious snark, the Bernie Brothers, have once again demonstrated that the entire Sanders campaign is either woefully tone deaf or a willing fifth column for Donald Trump.
As the campaign has ramped up, Donald Trump has increasingly been trying to horn in on the Democratic primaries with a view to poisoning the well against the Democratic candidate he fears most, Joe Biden.
Not satisfied with earning himself an impeachment, even if he was acquitted by Republican senators in a rigged procedure that will live in infamy, Trump and his redeless, Russophile followers have begun to disseminate a probably Kremlin-originated bit of disinformation that Joe Biden is suffering from a cognitive decline. Put in simple, non-Vulcan English, the Trump types are claiming that Joe Biden is losing his marbles.
Of course, the Trumpist attack, based as it is on Vice President Biden’s acknowledged childhood stammer/stutter is directly akin to Donald Trump’s disgusting November 25, 2015 attack on the New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, in which Trump mocked Kovaleski for the reporter’s arthrogryposis, a congenital joint condition. Of course, we cannot expect anything better from Trump than a revolting attack on someone’s disability.
On the other hand, we can, and should, expect a great deal better from any Democratic candidate and that candidate’s supporters. Yet, both the Independent Vermont senator and his supporters have uncritically repeated the unverified, Kremlin-originated claim that Vice President Biden is on the brink of, or actually suffering from, dementia.
This weaponization of Vice President Biden’s childhood speech impediment (and particularly from one Bridge and Tunnel Outer Boroughs septuagenarian from Queens whose vocabulary includes such clunkers as “covfefe” and “hamberders” and another Bridge and Tunnel Outer Boroughs septuagenarian whose woefully uncorrected Brooklyn accent leaves him unable to pronounce the initial H in words like huge or humanitarian) is not only insulting to people who have experience with stuttering, it is also a slap in the face to every American who may be suffering from any disability at all. As a southpaw child, I grappled with a mild form of stuttering. When I injured my left hand during a workout four years ago, and had to try to write with my right hand, my brief experience as a compulsory Northpaw caused that stutter to come roaring back. All this, despite having a faculty for language that produced a 780 verbal (out of 800) on my SAT. Thus, I don’t take attacks on stuttering or stutterers terribly kindly.
Perhaps this explains why I have nothing but disdain for the sour, superannuated shtetl Stalinist, the mendacious misogynist, the loudmouthed Leninist loser, the blowhard bloviating Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders and his supporters. Their willingness to weaponize Vice President Biden’s history of childhood stuttering against him is a slur upon decency, upon morality, upon how we are called on as human beings to treat one another.
Add to their moral failings on that issue, the manifest misogynistic disdain expressed by the senator and his supporters for Massachusetts Senator and former presidential candidate Warren, to say nothing of the nastiness expressed by the Burlington Bolshevik and his supporters for Hillary Clinton four years ago, and it becomes clear that there is absolutely no moral case for supporting Bernard Sanders. We neither need nor want some kind of ersatz October Revolution led by an angry synthetic Leninist and his legions of wannabe Komsomoltsy.
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Of course, while Gospodin Sanders and his redeless, cargo-shorts-communist krewe are eagerly trafficking in Trumpian tropes against the Democratic front runner, they did manage to sell a hell of a lot of Californians a bill of goods. However, in Los Angeles County, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of voters may have been turned away from the polling places in frustration at the gross, possibly criminal, incompetence of Los Angeles County registrar recorder, Dean Logan, and his bureaucrats.
In a misguided effort to “facilitate voting,” Los Angeles County abolished most of its neighborhood voting precincts. No longer could you walk down the block to a polling place in your neighborhood, staffed by your neighbors, and engage in the friendly neighborhood social interactions most of us who were brought up in Los Angeles County associated with voting. By way of example, I cast my 1992 general election vote for Bill Clinton in the parish hall of St. Ambrose church in West Hollywood, a block and a half from where I lived. It was a five-minute walk to my precinct. Now, under Dean Logan’s plan, one has to go to a so-called voting center, often a considerable distance from where one had been accustomed to vote, and there one had to interact with bureaucrats whom one did not know, and attempt to work with technology with which one was not familiar.
Naturally, this so-called “innovation” led to the same kind of pig’s breakfast that prevailed in Palm Beach County, Florida in the general election of 2000, and which enabled George Dubya Bush to steal the election from Al Gore. While the voting in Los Angeles County was not marred by butterfly ballots, which when offered to a heavily retirement age electorate caused frequent cases of what commentators soon christened “electile dysfunction,” it was still marred by hours long lines at polling places, difficult-to-work technology, and frustration levels that caused a lot of people to conclude that they should simply walk away without having exercised their franchise.
The cockup in Los Angeles County was voter suppression made all the worse because it had been occasioned not by some kind of deliberate effort to suppress the vote, but by the arrogance of unelected bureaucrats operating with the kind of mentality that has become all too typical of the Democratic Party: just supply people with the raw data and they will spontaneously perform the appropriate analysis and derive the correct conclusion.
Dean Logan, having made the decision to roll out the new “voting center” plan, and its unproven technology, ought to be fired and unceremoniously marched out of his workplace, preferably in handcuffs, doing a perp walk. At the very least, the new system should have been beta tested in small voting jurisdictions such as West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, San Fernando, or Santa Monica, where any glitches could have been found and corrected. More to the point, Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra ought to be looking into Mr. Logan with a view to prosecuting him for having interfered with the voting rights of hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of Los Angeles County residents and Angeleños who may have been deterred from exercising their franchise in this most consequential primary election in recent California history. What happened in Los Angeles County was simply unforgivable. Dean Logan's metaphorical head should be on a pike outside the Los Angeles County Hall of Administration.
In fact, what happened in Los Angeles County merits Legislative intervention to ensure that the new system of so-called voting centers is scrapped or beta tested before being foisted on a county with millions of voters. Los Angeles County needs to return posthaste to neighborhood precincts, where voting can be participated in and understood as an activity to be undertaken with one’s neighbors in a fashion that reinforces extensive democracy, not top-down bureaucracy.
Fire Dean Logan. Abolish voting centers. Restore neighborhood voting.
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Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the city Council, and who practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. Additionally, he served for a dozen years, on or off, as a member of the Riverside County Democratic Central Committee. The views set forth herein are his own, unless you find them congenial, in which case, they can be yours, too.
As used occasionally in this blog, the term “Little Snappers” is a borrowing from the late Chief Justice Warren Burger, who used to let off steam by penning brief concurrences or dissents, usually unpublished, which he called “Little Snappers.” Berger regarded them as devices for maintaining sanity.
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