"Shadow" is the name of the app designed by a couple of former Hillary Clinton campaign tech operatives to allegedly "streamline" precinct reporting of the Monday night vote tallies. The only problem is, it failed miserably. Whether it failed by ineptitude or by design doesn't really matter.
The lack of results, the final announcement of which could be deliberately withheld not by hours but by whole weeks, serves the ultimate purpose of the oligarch-led Democratic Party: It has denied Bernie Sanders his victory speech and it has tried to water down his momentum.
We might have seen this coming after the Des Moines Register abruptly cancelled the release of its pre-caucus polling over the weekend, because one lone pollster allegedly forgot to mention Pete Buttigieg's name to some of the people she called.
The lame excuse offered by the Democratic machine, of "inconsistencies" in the reporting process, is obviously code for "the results showing Bernie to be the blowout winner are inconsistent with the values and desires of the plutocrats who own the place."
The excuse seems to be backfiring spectacularly, especially as it comes right on the heels of the Democrats' deliberately inept and watered-down impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump. It brings back unpleasant memories of the "hanging chad" debacle that allowed the Supreme Court to undemocratically appoint George W. Bush president in 2000. It is also reminiscent of the Obamacare enrollment catastrophe, remnants of which persist to this very day.
I had predicted last week that a computer hack or meltdown preventing voting and/or ballot counting at the national nominating convention might be one party excuse for denying Sanders the nomination. In the interests of "national security" and the defeat of the TrumPutin menace, a hasty superdelegate ballot could then be conducted against a background of manufactured panic to anoint a nominee. Party unity would then become the new definition of patriotism.
Little did we know that the Democratic machine would get started with their subterfuge so early.
More troubling news is that the Shadow app was launched by ACRONYM, a party-affiliated tech firm which also works for Pete Buttigieg's campaign and which now conveniently disavows any connection with Shadow. Maybe there's an enterprising Wendy out there who can sew it back onto Peter Pan.
This connection is rendered all the more troubling by Buttigieg's hasty declaration of outright victory on Monday night. Does Buttigieg know what The Shadow knows?
His connection to the Clinton/Obama-controlled machine is further cemented by his connection to the Alliance For Democracy, a shadowy consortium of party leaders and wealthy donors.
Many of the Alliance For Democracy's liberal plutocratic members were recently named to leadership positions in the Democratic National Committee, ostensibly to help effect a brokered nominating convention in Milwaukee this summer.
As the New York Times reported last April:
The matter of What To Do About Bernie and the larger imperative of party unity has, for example, hovered over a series of previously undisclosed Democratic dinners in New York and Washington organized by the longtime party financier Bernard Schwartz. The gatherings have included scores from the moderate or center-left wing of the party, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California; Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader; former Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia; Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., himself a presidential candidate; and the president of the Center for American Progress, Neera Tanden.You might remember Schwartz as the oligarch who was embroiled in a bit of a scandal for selling missile technology to China at the same time he was bankrolling the Clintons, who then occupied the White House. He was later exonerated of any wrongdoing by Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno. He is currently a major funder of the centrist, pro-austerity Democratic think tank, Third Way, and also chairs the Rothkopf Group. Its founder, David Rothkopf, is a lobbyist representing the despotic United Arab Emirates and who frequently appears on MSNBC and CNN to tout US-Saudi relations without disclosing his own shadowy affiliations.
It's a tangled web. Follow the money if you can, since it's mostly dark money. Stay on the lookout for the same familiar faces sitting on the same corporate boards and think tanks and corporate cable panels who spout the identical bellicose talking points with the same blatant hypocrisy. They are all too easy to spot.
Meanwhile, internal polling by the Sanders campaign shows him, as expected, to be the de facto blowout winner of the Iowa caucuses. The New York Times and other corporate media outlets have since obligingly removed all traces of his voting lead from their home-pages and relevant apps.
That's the thing about neoliberal technocrats. They always try to fix what isn't broken. And when they succeed in ruining people's lives and trampling all over their basic human rights - including the right to vote - they never blame themselves. They always blame the latest inexplicable technology glitch or foreign interference. Passive-aggressive is too kind a word for these sociopaths.
This is especially true when they pose as anti-Trump #Resistance, Inc. crime fighters, when all this is really about is an internecine oligarchic mob war, with democracy as the collateral damage.
Ask not what evil lurks in the hearts of men (and women). Simply marvel at the fact that it doesn't much bother lurking any more. It's proudly right out there in the open. It's right in your face.
Nobody could ever have predicted..... don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good... mistakes were made... go screw yourselves.
