Not So Super Tuesday

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

OK, I'm going to deviate from the norm and start this piece by announcing that 538, based on the unreleased data they've seen, announced Bernie Sanders won last night's Iowa Caucus. The two New England senators in the race, Sanders and Warren, finished 1-2, getting 22 and 18% of the votes, respectively. Joe Biden finished a disappointing fourth (It's worth noting that, even though Iowa is about 97% white and hardly represents the much more diverse national electorate, not one candidate of either party who's finished out of the top three in the Iowa Caucus has ever been elected president, explaining the nation's first caucus' talismanic effect on candidates and the media alike).
    Now, let's go back on Memory Lane to the sad story that preceded the greatest electoral clusterfuck since the Florida count on Election Night 2000.

    It all started normally enough. Bernie won a couple of small precincts, such as one made up almost entirely of Ethiopian meat packers who went for Bernie 14-1. He won a Latino-majority precinct, another one at a Muslim-majority precinct and one at Drake University (67.7% to Warren's 32.3%), the scene of the last debate. MSNBC's own numbers released this on Twitter: "Sanders 60.6% Warren 21.1% Buttigieg 11.3% Yang 4.2% Klobuchar 1.4%." Then, just when it looked as if Bernie was winning big, that's the precise moment when the proverbial shit hit the fan.
     Then we started hearing a phrase: "Quality control."
    It was in reference to the app that was injudiciously handed over to Robbie Mook, Hillary's campaign manager in 2016 who would assure his place in American political history by, along with everyone else in the Clinton campaign and the DNC (same thing), got his emails hacked and released by Wikileaks. Yes, absolutely perfect choice to vouchsafe the security of an experimental app that, surprise surprise, was created by a tech company called, get this, Shadow, Inc, (perhaps named by the same person who named Parnas' company "Fraud Guarantee"), that was founded by two members of Clinton's 2016 communications team.
    Iowa Democratic officials decided to clamp down on all poll results not because they were embargoing them, although it certainly looked that way, but because the app crashed. The various precinct captains, and there were 1700 of them, couldn't use the app as it was intended to send in their precinct's final tallies. The hot line they had as a back-up also crashed. Frustrated, most of the captains just gave up for the night and today sent in the results any which way they could.
    

     Even reliable corporate talking head Brian Williams began to smell a rat, reporting, "I've never seen anything like this."
     Perhaps reading what few tea leaves there were at the time, Joe Biden's legal team got involved and demanded that caucus officials cease releasing results they simply didn't have. The Sanders campaign, in a dark foreboding moment, was called into an office and it gave Bernie Bros a discomfiting sense this was a hastily-rigged exit interview that would end with an escort out the front door. No, this wasn't happening again, we desperately groaned.
     By this morning, Mayor Pete was proclaiming victory. Warren proclaimed victory. Biden stopped stuttering long enough to proclaim victory. Sanders proclaimed victory. Even Amy Klobuchar, at best an afterthought, was proclaiming victory. In short, virtually all the Democrats were proclaiming victory, the exact same thing the rest were afraid Sanders would do after the caucus.

     Things were getting so desperate, they were bringing in this guy.
    So, with the Democrats making their last doomed pitch for expelling Trump from an office he never legitimately won, the Super Bowl, today's final impeachment vote and the State of the Union, this is shaping up to be a hell of a week. And it's only Wednesday.

Elsewhere on Mordor...

A questionable Yahoo poll said Trump's approval rating shot up to 49%, the highest it's ever been, since last night, especially after the joke of a GOP Iowa caucus that, in numbers only seen in strongman banana republics, saw Trump winning over 97% of the vote. No doubt, that alleged bump in approval comes in anticipation of the other joke coming up in the Senate, that of the acquittal of the most corrupt "president" in all US political history.

    Yes, a man who was impeached (conservatively) on two counts and being tried on them even as I write this is now enjoying the highest approval ratings he's ever seen and had won by 96% over his closest rival a caucus in a state in which he didn't bother campaigning. Even with the UK leaving the EU after handing Boris Johnson a majority by a landslide, I think our friends across the pond can breathe a sigh of relief that America has once again reclaimed its place as the indisputably stupidest nation on the planet.  Bravo. Well played.

     The ladies in Congress (those who will be attending, any way), will once again wear white to honor the women who'd secured the right to vote with the passage of the 19th amendment a century ago. But if taken in an Asian context, in which white is the traditional color of mourning, the white color scheme could also symbolize the death of democracy when the staggeringly corrupt and craven Republican Party votes to a man to acquit Trump for selling out our allies and our national security for his personal benefit.

     We're just recovering from a seemingly endless amateur hour in Iowa in which votes were tallied by raised hands, a broken down app created by Blue Dog partisans and coin flips (such as in Precinct 80, in which Sanders won 101 votes to Buttegeig's 66, which apparently triggered a coin toss that wound up awarding four delegates apiece to both men).

     A guy who will survive expulsion from office mere hours after a hideously and nakedly brazen partisan vote will deliver a State of the Union Address and crowing like a cock on a dung hill about the witch hunt hoax and, let's release the name of the whistleblower, while we're at it, you know, like Rand Paul did in the Senate yesterday while Chief Justice John Roberts serenely smiled down on him.

     Between the nightmare that was the Iowa caucus and the failed impeachment, this was not a good week for Democrats who demonstrated they could not carry out an impeachment that, in any court of law, would be a slam dunk case. They demonstrated last night they can't master the simple act of counting.

     And this is the party that will bring back jobs, overhaul the banking system, give Medicare to all and balance the budget?