"Six Caucus Coin Tosses in Clinton's Favor Give Hillary Tiny Lead," reported Rob Kall in OpEdNews this morning, 2 January 2016.
Coin tosses?
Isn't something serious at stake here? For some people, raising the minimum wage, or expanding Social Security, or Medicare-For-All (all of which Hillary opposes) are matters of life and death. Some people are offended by the very idea of their life being decided by a coin toss.
Not even the consummately evil Republican Party decides who they will choose with a coin toss. They report actual vote totals. In Iowa, the Democratic Party reports SDE's (State Delegate Equivalents--don't ask what that is!), instead of the vote count. SDE's? What are they? What do they look like? Why are they preferable to people's votes?
On top of this, the Democratic Party establishment did not send impartial staffers to 90 caucus sites and is "now reaching out to the candidates themselves for help reporting the data, which means that precinct captains from the rival campaigns will have to self-report totals from the caucus." Self-report? That's like asking George "Dubya" Bush to explain the hanging chads.
Might not accuracy matter? The official final tally gave Hillary 710 and Bernie 697 SDE's (whatever that obfuscation means), which is a very tiny "victory" at best (but does not include the super-delegates whom Hillary has in her pockets, who can vote for whomever they want regardless of whom their precinct supports).
Suppose someone counted wrong. Suppose someone was dishonest? Suppose what they determined was a tie, actually wasn't.
The good people who run the Democratic Party in Iowa insist that we shouldn't worry, that the party establishment is fair, and good, and honest. Ask Debbie Wasserman Shultz!
Back to the coin toss issue. Hate to mention it (and risk being called a conspiracy theorist) but the probability of rolling six coin tosses in a row in Hillary's favor is quite low, one and a half percent to be exact. In other words there is a 98.5% chance that this should not happen.
But it happened in Iowa last night, and the Main-Stream-Democrat-Bowl-of-**** (the one that Lewis Black claimed was not so different than the Republican-Bowl-Of-****), as well as the main-street media and their pundits assure us that there is no question of foul play. They infer that by asking questions we are sore losers. Huh?
Bernie Sanders has called on the Democratic Party to release a raw vote count in Iowa. He called on officials to take the unusual step of revealing the voter totals: "I can only hope and expect that the count will be honest," he said. To no one's surprise, the Iowa Democrats have refused his small request.
One of the metaphors Bernie has repeated over and over again to describe our corrupt oligarchy is: "Heads They Win, Tails You Lose."
In Iowa, this is no metaphor; this is no cheap joke. It's reality.
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