By Bob Gaydos

Bernie Sanders

Three questions in the wake of whatever it was that just happened in Iowa:

• Can anyone – preferably a Democrat – tell me what Hillary Clinton stands for? In other words, what is her message?
• Why do mainstream media assume there’s no way Bernie Sanders can win the Democratic nomination, never mind the presidency?
• Since when does winning an election, or caucus or whatever else you may call it depend on the flip of a coin?

Let’s start with Hillary. As far as I can tell, after 16 years (at least) of running for president, the only message I still hear is that Hillary should be president because she’s been around, she wants it and it’s her turn. She’s been patient through Bill’s years in the White House and she’s been running ever since they had to vacate (penniless, I believe she initially claimed).

Yes, she took time to serve as senator from New York, but that really was necessary to fill out the resume for a presidential run. Being secretary of state was a bittersweet consolation prize for losing the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination to Barack Obama, who apparently never got the memo that it was Hillary’s turn to run. It certainly topped off her resume.

Yet all I hear is that she’s really smart, has a lot of experience, knows a lot of stuff and will do a good job of running things. Now, that’s clearly more than can be said of pretty much all of the Republican presidential candidates, but she’s not running against any of them yet.

What is she going to do as president? What is she going to change about a system with which Americans of all political persuasions are disenchanted, to say the least? Maybe it’s me, but all I hear is that she’ll do a good job, even a better job, of managing what Obama leaves behind.

 A lot of the major media seem to have bought into this message. That was pretty much the essence of the New York Times editorial endorsing Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the Iowa primary. Hillary has the experience to carry on the way we have been carrying on.

Unfortunately for Clinton, the New York Times, and other establishment media that support her candidacy, a lot of Americans don’t seem to want to carry on the way we’ve been carrying on. That’s undoubtedly why a lot of young people, not thrilled with the future being crafted for them, have flocked to the Sanders candidacy

In fact, it seems to be why a lot of people have flocked to a host of Republican candidates who are anything but establishment figures. The fact that virtually all of them aren’t qualified to be president is another matter.

For what it’s worth, I think Obama has done a pretty good job cleaning up the mess left by Bush/Cheney. He’s done this in the face of non-stop resistance from Republicans from his first day in office. There’s no reason to believe that Clinton, no favorite of congressional Republicans, will have any easier time of it in that regard. Furthermore, her ties to the banking industry and corporate America (through Bill and the Clinton Foundation), cast serious doubt on any claim she might make that she is different from Republicans. (Her claim the other night that she is not part of the Democratic Establishment is laughable.)

And, as I recall, she couldn’t get her healthcare plan through a Democratic Congress in Bill’s first term. How does that make her a manager who “gets things done”? It’s a claim that much of major media have apparently accepted as fact because she and her supporters keep saying it: Why Hillary? Because she’s a manager.

Sanders, by contrast, is an “eccentric” senator with “unruly” hair, as he was characterized in an Associated Press story the morning after the Iowa caucus. This was supposedly a straight news story reporting on the outcome of the caucus. There were no adjectives attached to Clinton’s name implying some not-so-subtle judgment. Where were the editors?

Again, maybe it’s just me, but when someone writing in Iowa describes Sanders, with a lifetime in public service, as “eccentric,” I can’t help but wonder if it’s code for 74-year-old Jew who still speaks with the accent of his native Brooklyn. New Yorkers are pretty good at cracking codes.

As for that Iowa vote, what a joke. Clinton claimed victory after edging Sanders by less than three-tenths of a point. Democrats don’t even vote privately in Iowa. They stand in opposite corners and try to convince others to join them. The biggest group gets the delegates from that district. When there’s a tie, they split the delegates — two for you, two for you. But when there’s an odd number of delegate at stake, the odd vote is awarded by flipping a coin. Clinton won six out of six flips — go figure — so she got a couple more delegates than Sanders. Smashing victory.

Even here, major media (NPR even) felt it necessary to weigh in after the fact to educate us that Clinton didn’t win Iowa on coin flips. Rather, they spelled out the entire ridiculously and unnecessarily complicated system by which Iowa Democrats award convention delegates. Seems there’s county delegates and state delegates and who-the-heck cares delegates and formulas for calculating percentage of delegates. It’s a system set up by the establishment to try to control the votes, so that candidates like Bernie Sanders, from Brooklyn via Vermont, can’t win.

But he did. The “virtual tie” was a statement for Sanders against the establishment — Democratic Party and major media.

My humble recommendations:

• For Clinton: Figure out what you really stand for and tell us. If you think you have to be a shill for banks and corporations in order to be effective as president, tell us why. At least it would be honest.
• For the major media: Listen and report the facts. Ask questions about real issues. Stop with the horse-race reporting based on polls. Do your job.
• Iowa Democrats: Have a simple vote, privately, for convention delegates. No coin flips. In case of ties, split the baby, as Solomon said. In this case, it works.

rjgaydos@gmail.com

By Bob Gaydos

Abubakar Shekau, leader of Boko Haram

Now, the world notices. Now, the world calls it an outrage. Now, it is not just an act of terrorism, it is a crime against all humanity.

But where was the world then, three weeks ago, when the outrage occurred? Where were we when members of the Boko Haram terrorist group swept down on a boarding school in Nigeria and kidnapped 276 of that African nation’s brightest girls from their dorms? Where were we a mere week ago when the leader of the extreme Islamist group threatened to sell the teenaged girls as “wives” for $12 apiece?

A lot of us, myself included, were focused on the words and actions of a man who shelled out millions to enjoy the company of women, a man who also owned a professional basketball team and who happened to be a racist as well as a misogynist. While Donald Sterling, whom I dubbed “the NBA plantation owner’’ in my blog, was being vilified and ridiculed in the media and on the Internet, Abubakar Shekau, commander of Boko Haram, was leading his bloodthirsty group on deadly attacks on Nigerian villages, government buildings, mosques and churches and kidnapping eight more girls.

For the most part, major media, electronic and print, downplayed or ignored the kidnapping story and hyped the Sterling fiasco. After all, Los Angeles, where Sterling’s team plays, is familiar and glamorous and Nigeria is, well, way over there in Africa somewhere. And Sterling had insulted a team of talented, male, black athletes while Shekau had kidnapped a group of young black girls. Double standard hardly seems to cover it.

It took — as it increasingly does these days — a social media campaign for, not just the news media, but other nations to learn about the plight of the Nigerian girls and to muster the moral outrage to offer to help the inept Nigerian government find and return them to their families.

The “#Bring Back Our Girls” campaign on Twitter began in Nigeria as a response to the failure of Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan to mount any effort to rescue the girls, 53 of whom escaped on the night of their abduction. The hapless president at first said only a few girls had been kidnapped and they had been rescued. When the girls’ parents refuted that story, he said he had no idea where the girls were and even faulted the fearful parents for not giving police enough information on their daughters. (The girls had returned to school to take final exams. Virtually all other girls schools in Nigeria were closed because of threats from Boko Haram.) Jonathan’s wife, Patience, actually ordered the arrest of parents protesting the government inaction because they made her husband look bad.

As the Internet campaign drew more support (more than a million tweets on May 8), the rest of the world — and news media — became aware of what was really happening in Nigeria. A ruthless group of extremist Muslims was trying to take over Africa’s largest country through sheer terror. Nigeria is an oil rich, half-Christian, half-Muslim nation whose people, as demonstrated by many protests, are united in their desire to find the girls. Now, Jonathan, whose army says it is outgunned by Boko Haram, has accepted offers of help from the United States, United Kingdom, China and France in finding the girls and punishing the extremist kidnappers.

Save for members of Boko Haram and other groups with similar extreme views of women’s “place” under Islam (such as the Taliban), a successful resolution to this crisis wished by most would be the safe return of all the girls, unharmed, with no ransom paid and the terrorists either dead or in prison. Doesn’t matter which.

Beyond that, however, lies the bigger challenge of recognizing and educating the world on the continuing lack of basic rights for women in many Muslim societies. Boko Haram loosely translated means “Western education is sinful.” The group supposedly believes its violence is justified by its religion, although Islamist scholars and millions of Muslims say this is not what their religion teaches. Unfortunately, the rare occasions in which Western media mention Islam tend to be in connection with groups like Boko Haram who use their extremist views to justify violence.

Furthermore, major media reporting on women’s rights and issues in general remains woefully inadequate, especially considering we’re talking about more than half the world’s population. Even in the Sterling story, the focus of reporting was on his racist comments while his misogynistic behavior was ignored by most media outlets.

As I said, I am guilty of having missed the Nigerian girls story while getting wrapped up in Sterling. It’s not that Sterling didn’t deserve to be revealed and reviled for the person he is. He did and I’m glad I did. But there’s no reason I couldn’t have been more aware of the Nigerian girls’ plight and raised my voice on their behalf as well.

Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani school girl who survived a shooting by Taliban extremists for daring to speak out for the right of girls in her country to get an education, said it simply, “If we remain silent then this will spread. It will happen more and more and more.”

More and more and more, it appears that major media institutions in America have forsaken their function of informing the public of injustices wherever and whenever they occur in favor of reporting the most convenient, easily explainable stories, preferably those with some celebrity name-recognition. That leaves it to the rest of us to demand more of our press and ourselves. Social media will undoubtedly lead the way. Bring Back Our Girls is on Facebook. It had more than 100,000 likes on May 8.

rjgaydos@gmail.com