So, Iowa Picked the Rapist with 91 Felony counts?

 

I don't especially enjoy the primary season because the idea of caucuses themselves are dense and dumb to me--what the whole fuck is going on with those? People are dropping votes randomly into paper bags and empty popcorn buckets. Who knows who is showing up? (I see no ID's in the deep freeze, they don't need these when the voters are all Y.T.'s.) 

And then there's Iowa itself--an entire state that feels like a FOX news set-up in a rural PA diner no more than ten miles from the nearest militia training site. What gets me is the state gets these political creatures camping out among them, speechifying at them, trying to shake hands with them for at least six months out of the year, and when the inevitable man/woman-in the street interviews take place, they just say the most normie, uninformed things. Like, one guy was hung up on where Vivek Ramaswamy was from because of 9/11. There were no Hindu people with Indian ancestry having anything to do with that. And if he was concerned, how about looking up anything at all ever? Candidates do townhalls, have debates, have featured articles in newspapers and magazines and there's FUCKING WIKIPEDIA and some dolt allowed to vote doesn't know where this man's people are from. OR who did 9/11. 

One young lady said she was just thinking about Jesus and how he died for our sins, and wasn't that why Trump was going through all these trials? No, damn it, I want to yell--you weren't thinking that; Trump and every asshole warming up the crowds for him told you that and it somehow drilled its way into the thing you pick out sandwich fixin's with. Being in trouble for defaming one of his rape/assault/harassment victims has NOTHING to do with you. He stole government docs belonging to the US Gov't which is basically all of us, and that is a crime against you. The insurrection was a crime against our government. Also against you. 

How in the hell did about half the caucus goers decide the guy who has been determined to be a rapist and a fraud, is twice-impeached, and had a whole bathroom's worth of White House docs, PLUS, horked out of his Florida home is still somehow fit to be president?

Iowa Caucus Follow-up

The first thing to get out of the way is--well, I'll be damned! Maybe Mayor Pete had the right idea to declare his pleasant surprise at the Iowa results (that weren't, exactly, yet) Tuesday night, because he did pretty damn well.* You can chalk that up to a handful of things, of course. Warren, Sanders and Klobuchar did have to do their duties in the Senate. His campaign speaks fluent "heartland."  Also, although he polls well, previous primary campaigns have left me wondering how former VP Joe Biden does in reality versus on paper.  

I know the Shadow/Acronym stuff looks really shady, but for the love of democracy, let's not do conspiracy theories. For one thing, the whole Iowa caucus thing is close and weird and the results are wonky, historically. For another, it looks like folks just wanted to up the digital game and inserted an app where it overpromised and underperformed. In the grand scheme of things, that's a far cry from any kind of "rigging" that I can tell. 

And I just want to talk for a minute about how cool it is that Buttigieg did well here, in the home of the FAMiLY Leader and all that. There's a lot of tolerance out there, and it's growing. (Despite the example of this person, who is getting her information about candidates from some very questionable sources. Of all the things I think one might have known going in about Buttigieg...that he served in the armed forces and is a happily married gay man: those are the two things.) 

Also, the other thing that's going on this year, again, and why people should keep the hell off of conspiracy theories, is that the fuckery is still very much with us:

Yeah. So, when Trump and his little fans want to discuss the caucus as a Democratic clusterfuck, um, no. Maybe a little bit of a cluster, but they helped. (And keep in mind, they want to divide the party by heightening any grievance felt by Sanders backers vs the establishment, so some of that shit needs to be recognized as enemy action on these internets.)  Also, the RNC is coronating a smooth-brained  impeached and acquitted but not exonerated wanna-be tyrant, so they have earned exactly zero democracy points.

Anyway, on to New Hampshire!

* But it looks like Sanders probably did actually take Iowa on the basis of raw votes. So what do I have to say about that? Um, cool? The Plan B for a possible total Biden implosion (which would hilariously make Trump/Giuliani Ukraine exploits to get "dirt" on him totally irrelevant to the Democrats and totally still damaging to Trump) is to smear the "Commie". But Democrats have been called "commies" since McCarthy. (Tail-gunner Joe, not Kevin. Except probably Kevin, too.) So I am all for "taking it back". This is a referendum on Trump's perfidy, but there's no reason to shy away from how to accomplish the 3rd of FDR's Four Freedoms.

Bailey Warren Just Won the Caucus

This speech solidified my support for @ewarren. Hit the right talking points plus earned sustained applause in my house for thanking her very good boy, Bailey. #ElizabethWarren #HopeOverFear https://t.co/N6ImCeVFpT

— Rebecca Murray (@becmur) February 4, 2020

Now, you can say, "How is that? Last I heard, Pete Buttigeig declared victory." And that would be a thing....he did. But just listen to my reasoning here:

Math didn't win in Iowa (Yang). Organization didn't win in Iowa (Sanders). Experience didn't win in Iowa (Biden). The plan didn't win in Iowa (Elizabeth Warren). And common sense sure didn't win in Iowa (Klobuchar). And you can't just congratulate a clusterfuck and decide it stands for a species of win, Mayor Pete.

So, it's looking to me like the whole darn thing went to the dogs. And Bailey is a very good boye.


UPDATE: But, no joke, this process is classist, sexist and ableist, and relies on people without kids or with guaranteed childcare, people who don't have work commitments they can't back out of, etc. It's a dopey process that shouldn't ever come down to "the handful of hardheads that can stay as long as it takes" and "some kind of app and the backup app both of which could be as buggy as a cowflop in July."

Ben Carson's Rise and Epistemic Closure

It is very reasonable to try and look at why soft-spoken political neophyte Dr. Ben Carson has risen above very loud-spoken political neophyte Donald Trump in the Iowa polling. I think his rise in the polling is fascinating particularly because even while he is mild-mannered, he says things that are way weirder than The Donald's output. It turns out that Iowans like Carson because the things he says are ridiculous. They like their candidates fringy. You take some random fringy thing he has said, like Obamacare is worse than slavery, and instead of going "Hey, slavery was not cool, and besides, covering our fellow-American's health care is basically decent", they love him because they were thinking that thing!

I wish this surprised me more, but it's kind of in line with the whole "Obama was responsible for the Katrina response" polling, where people actually agreed with a completely non-factual statement. It's almost impossible to plumb whether the respondents agree with this untrue thing on the basis of sheer ignorance of facts, which should be impossible given how recently it occurred, or whether they have partisan impulses so overwhelming that facts simply do not matter.

In part, and no surprise, I blame FOX Mushroom Farm a lot for this state of affairs by purporting to be a news organization that somehow leaves people entirely less well-informed. I also in part blame Glenn Beck, because Ben Carson sounds like a guy who learned everything he ever knew about public policy from Glenn Beck rallies. Take the Cleon Skousen connection. Where in the world does one find this weirdo Bircher guy that would probably be shunned by the upright Yale or Harvard National Review types of the 1950's?

One is the Loneliest Number Rick Could Ever Do

Apparently, low turnout at Iowa events is all part of former Senator Rick Santorum's strategy:

"It's not glamorous, and you're not out there raising money, but you're doing what the money is ultimately supposed to do — getting votes," said Santorum, who earlier in the day drew 10 people to a noon meeting in nearby Panora. "This is a lot more fun than being on the phone raising money."

So in the middle of the workday in Hamlin, a township of under 300 people, Santorum said he saw one person as a good crowd.

Actually, that's a hell of a fair point--anything sounds better than having to do a one-on-one call to wheedle money out of some rich folks. It sounds like operating a phone sex line for nasty people with a cutting food stamps fetish where they are especially turned on when you call them.

And I also wonder if low turnout is probably going to be a thing now that we've got so very many people running for 2016 and hanging out in Iowa generally.

"Say, there's nothing new at the Cineplex, what do you want to do?"

"Well, there's a presidential candidate in town, want to go stare at him?"

"Oh, you know I hate that. They always seem so sad, like they'd rather be someplace else."

(Sometimes the wanting to be someplace else is actually palpable.)

I think Santorum probably isn't going to have quite the success he did in 2012--but who knows? At least he isn't being objectively pro-molester, like Mike Huckabee, and isn't under indictment for anything.  Still and all, I don't see a happy ending for Santorum.

That Political Thing in Iowa

You know what the Democratic Party seems to be missing? Shindigs. We do not seem to have neat gatherings like CPAC and traditions like the Ames straw poll, and hosting religious groups like The Response, or doing that very interesting "Freedom Summit" in Iowa--you know, shindigs. I watch them as a political observer, but have to admit--not my team, looks like fun. I mean, there's Netroots Nation. It's blogger-oriented so I should be able to really get behind that. But that's a wonkfest. Where's our uncovered nekkid id triumphialization? Where's our scattering of red meat for reubens? (Why is Blogger's spellcheck so madly unaware of the correct spelling of the perfectly jake 1930's slang for gape-jawed hayseed? Or even the perfectly cromulent term "jake"?)

Anyway, I digress. Dave Weigel over at Bloomberg notes what "serious" 2016 candidates Mitt, Jeb, Bobby, Marco and Rand have missed.  What I believe they missed was associating too broadly with Rep. Steve King, whose blue eyes always seem to carry the faraway milkseed pollen drift of a person whose thoughts take him back again and again to the border and the constant battle against the cantaloupe-calved drug-runners whose backpacks full of Acapulco's finest hops have once again consigned a generation to jazz music, sloth, and backtalk. There are people who think he might be a little bit too racialist to actually be an appropriate association.

And yet there are so many who do not!

Left bloggers have noted that Sarah Palin's speech seems to have defaulted to Whargarble after her Teleprompter fail--but I listened and frankly think that although her sentence structure resembles nothing so much as an attempt at cut-up poetry using all the Republican memes, I tend to think that a sympathetic audience could have tracked what she was saying very well.

All in all--not really any surprises or over the top signifying that got my leftist goat--oh except Carly Fiorina.  She actually got my Irish up. She said:

“Like Hillary Clinton, I too have traveled hundreds of thousands of miles around the globe,” she said. “But unlike her, I have actually accomplished something. Mrs. Clinton, flying is an activity not an accomplishment.”