Evidence of corruption mounts
Late Monday, after caucus voting had ended, although it had been reported that the poll, by polling form Seltzer & Co., was being cancelled and its results blocked, those results were somehow obtained and published by NY Times pollster Nate Silver's Five Thirty-Eight website. Those results proved to be, as the website put it, "shocking," showing that Sanders was in the lead at 22%, followed by Warren at 18%, Buttigieg at 16% (barely above the 15% cutoff) and that Biden was out of the counting at a wretched 13%. Seeing these numbers, and knowing the DNC's and the media's antipathy for Sanders and support for Biden, one might be forgiven for suspecting why the poll was withheld, particularly given that it was said to have been done on the basis on one person's complaint about Buttigieg's name being omitted from the options offered by the poll caller. (The claim is that the pollster making the call had enlarged the print on her screen and that had pushed Buttigieg's name, which in that iteration of the list was last, below the bottom of the screen, where she missed it.)
Hillary's revenge: Failed App the work of top veterans of her 2016 campaign
Then comes word that the smart phone app being used by the Democratic caucus officials in Iowa was hastily created in two months late last year, with "inadequate testing" by a firm called Shadow, Inc., whose owners were not publicly listed on the company's website and were kept secret by the DNC. It turns out they're all veterans of the 2016 Clinton campaign! Really! Recall that the DNC was already badly tarnished by reports from not just Wikileaks but by insiders like Rep. Tulsi Gabbard who in 2016 resigned as a vice-chair of the DNC charging it and the Clinton campaign were colluding to sabotage the Sanders campaign, and Donna Brazile, who has exposed how Clinton basically "bought" the DNC by quietly providing $25 million to pay off its deficit before the 2016 primaries began. How could the party's leadership organization have turned around and hired Clinton hacks to produce the counting app for the Iowa Caucus (and the coming Nevada primary, which has now dropped it)? The Intercept has just published a piece showing how embedded Shadow Inc is, not just in the DNC but in the Buttigieg campaign. The whole scandal is outrageous.
The takeaway
When the sabotage of a candidate like Sanders gets so serious and so blatant, two things occur to me:
* The first is that if Sanders is perceived as such an existential threat to the corrupt Democratic Party and to the mass media that act as a propaganda organ for the US elite and for the whole US imperial system, that they collectively feel compelled to resort to this kind of banana republic-style electoral subterfuge, Sanders must really be a candidate worthy of our votes, support and defense! Leftist critics who call him a "sheep dog" for the Democratic Party clearly need to rethink their accusations.
* And two: Why the hell would the Russians bother to hack this country's election with the Democratic leadership so ready and willing to do this kind of sabotage on their own dime?
DAVE LINDORFF is founding editor of ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site. His work, and that of colleagues JOHN GRANT, JESS GUH, GARY LINDORFF, ALFREDO LOPEZ, LINN WASHINGTON, JR., and the late CHARLES M. YOUNG, can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net
(Article changed on February 5, 2020 at 15:55)
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