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The 2020 presidential election got underway Monday with the Iowa Caucuses. Iowa often sets the tone---the momentum--- for the rest of the primaries in national elections.
The Democrats could not even report the results of their caucus---nobody knew who won.
"It was an app," they say, that created all the chaos.
Be informed.
I'll be sharing a few thoughts about the President's State of the Union address on our live radio program this morning. Please join me. Here's how.
Caucus chaos.
The New York Post was the first to report on the caucus chaos. Others have since reported it.
I tuned in Monday evening to see how the Democrats were doing in Iowa. I was curious who would win the first in the national primary---which is a caucus, as opposed to a regular "put your ballot in the box" election.
I already knew Trump had won the Republican caucus with 97% of the Republican vote.
We turned to Fox News first and found them repeating again and again that they couldn't understand why the Democrat Party would not report the results of the day.
Thinking maybe someone didn't want Fox to have the results first, we switched to MSNBC and CNN finding more confusion and anger, but no results.
Soon, well-known personalities were discovering what we had discovered. There were no results. Yet. But they are coming. Honest.
By yesterday there were still no results. The Democrat candidates, all hoping for a momentum boost from the Iowa results, had moved on to the next primary in New Hampshire, not knowing who had won the Iowa primary.
Herman Cain tweeted, "These are the people who want you to put them in charge of everything."
Ann Coulter tweeted, "Our new country's going to be GREAT!"
Did Hillary "app" Bernie Sanders. Again?
Most of us who pay attention to such things, remember that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders had more than policy differences in the 2016 primaries.
In fact, after securing the Democrat nomination, it was revealed that Hillary's crew had actually, purposefully undermined Bernie's campaign with the assistance of the Democrat Party itself.
The chair of the Democrat Party was forced to resign over the conflict. Hillary hired her the same day she resigned from the Party.
Two weeks ago, the New York Times published a feature story on Hillary. It began with this:
For three years, Hillary Clinton has watched the Democratic Party search for a path forward in the Trump era.
She’s watched as liberals and moderates clashed on how best to fight President Trump and a White House that was almost hers. She’s watched as some voters questioned the “electability” of the six women running for president, doubts that she once faced. She’s watched as Senator Bernie Sanders has risen, after his withering opposition to her in the 2016 presidential primary, to become the dominant liberal force in the 2020 race.
And she’d largely refrained from weighing in — until Tuesday morning, when The Hollywood Reporter published an interview with Mrs. Clinton promoting a new documentary about her that will premiere on Saturday at the Sundance Film Festival. In the documentary, she rips into Mr. Sanders and declines to say if she would endorse him and campaign on his behalf if he were to win the Democratic nomination.
“Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician,” she said. “It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.” Asked by The Reporter recently if that assessment still held, she replied, “Yes, it does.”
The New York Post reports it was the "app" that essentially shut down the Democrat caucus.
They say, "The app blamed for Iowa's stalled Democratic caucus results was slapped together by an alumn of Hillary Clinton's failed 2016 presidential campaign."
They say the Iowa Democrats hired Gerard Niemira, CEO of Shadow Inc. to build the app for reporting the results of the crucial, first in the nation caucus. He formerly served as Director of product for Hillary's 2016 campaign.
The Party had not shared publicly who was creating the $60,000 app.
Dr. Karen Kedrowski, director of CAT Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University, told the Post, "The changes that were made to the caucus this year were in response to criticism from [Sen Bernie] Sanders' campaign in 2016."
She says "the app was supposed to be one of multiple fixes made to the caucus process after Sanders campaign challenged certain procedures from 2016 as unfair."
There's more in the Post, and the Times stories---in essence: The candidates are angry, Shadow Inc. is trying to explain, while their parent company, ACRONYM, is trying to distance themselves from all of this.
Will there be a "deja vu all over again?"
Ironically, this same group was also contracted by other state Democrat parties. To fix problems.
Nevada is the next state to hold a caucus on February 11. Nevada has also quietly installed "the app" from Shadow Inc. They too have done so to "address Bernie's complaints from 2016."
Last year the company ACRONYM announced it was launching Shadow Inc. "To harness, integrate and manage data across the platforms and technologies."
The candidates, including Bernie, are not questioning that they have "harnessed the data"---they are asking what they're doing with it? And what does the data say?
Takeaway.
When I heard that Rush Limbaugh announced this week that he has been diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer---I remembered some of the quotes he's made over the years. He often said, "Everything about the Left is perception, manipulation, and lies...everything is structured deception."
This is true because to the progressive, there is no fixed or eternal Truth. Everything, including Truth, is fluid and evolving.
My friend, the late Ed Cole, well known for his motivational speeches to Christian men, would often tell his audiences: "Knowledge of God's Word is a bulwark against deception, temptation, accusation, even persecution."
The "Truth" Himself said (Matthew 5:13-16):
"You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot of men. You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden..."
Politics are dirty and deceptive. And that's exactly why Christians must be present in the issues of our culture. Otherwise, how can the cultural rot be restrained? How can the light penetrate the darkness?
Be Informed. Be Discerning. Be Bold. Be Prayerful. Be Pro-Active.