Well, that was fun

I was ill yesterday, and the last thing I was going to do was do a deep dive into the Iowa caucuses. It's an unrepresentative, anti-democratic shitshow which has no business being the first contest in the Democratic election season.

But boy howdy, I wasn't expecting what happened last night / this morning to happen.

I mean, really? How did the Iowa Democratic Party mess up this badly? Whose brilliant idea was it to put vote tallies on an app? Did Iowa Democrats forget how to organize these bastard children of democracy?

Everyone claimed victory except for Joe Biden, and he rightly declined to do so. This was, as the British say, a cock up of major proportions.

I just now Googled "Iowa Caucus" and got this:

I mean, come on, man! I've been following politics since I was ten, and this has never happened in all that time, where a state's caucus / primary was so badly run that results still aren't in, and may never be in.

The idea that a lily-white state should be first in the nation to choose the Democratic nominee for president just took a possible death-blow. And, furthermore, caucuses as valid vehicles to make that selection likewise are on their deathbeds. You never see these issues with primary states. Caucuses empower bullies to cow the less assertive. And, as we see, they have peculiar issues with tabulating results.

The conspiracy theories are already flying thick and fast from Camp Bernie. #BernieWon #CIAPete and #MayorCheat are the top trending hashtags. Yes, because somehow Pete Buttigieg paid off the Iowa Democratic Party to be completely incompetent at running an election they've been running for decades. While I'm glad the caucus crashed and burned, make no mistake: This will be a rallying cry for Sanders dead-enders to claim that yet again their god-given right to rule has been stolen from them.

At a time when Democrats have to show competence and sobriety, as they have in Donald Trump's trial, this farce is unhelpful. Hopefully, if nothing else, this will be the end of caucuses in favor of simple primaries. This year continues its spectacularly bad start.