The Iowa caucus is still a mess, a bad enough one that Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez has called for a "recanvass" of the entire operation.

No results, and more to the point, no believable explanation, either.  The explanations have shifted so many times that it's now come down to the all-purpose one: blaming Trump.

According to Fox News:

Workers manning the phones in Iowa after the state's disastrous caucus on Monday reportedly claim that President Trump backers flooded the hotline number for precinct chairs that led to even more confusion and disarray.

...and...

Ken Sagar, a Democratic central committee member in the state, told a conference call Wednesday that on the night of the caucus, Trump backers were calling in to voice their support for the president, Bloomberg reported. Sagar was reportedly one of the people answering the calls.

It's nothing but a cover for their own failures in putting on a basic primary caucus.

This one sounds particularly far-fetched, given that the Trump campaign operation has no history of this kind of activity, quite unlike various Democratic operations.

Number one, why are we hearing about this just now instead of when it was supposedly happening?  The claim reported by Fox comes from a couple of Democratic operatives, who said Trumpsters "flooded" the lines. 

The word "flooded" is pretty convenient.  The real question is, how many calls were there, what were their particular phone numbers (in the smartphone age, they'd have them), and how many such calls does it take for a Democrat to make a "flood" to ruin the caucus, like a pre-ordained plan?  If it was a flood, why did only two of them get the flood, not all of them?  

It's odd stuff, but even that doesn't excuse the Democrats.  The next question after is why their call-in line number got out, and why didn't they put security guardrails on it, permitting only certain callers?  It's the internet age; they could have done it.

It would have been no problem for Democrats to yell Republican interference on election night, given their dislike of Republicans.  But now we're just hearing about it, and at this point, it sounds as though the dog ate their homework.

The chronology tells another story.

First, the problem was blamed on a reporting app.  That was Day One. 

Bad app, no hacking, they said.  According to Iowa Democratic Party spokeswoman Mandy McClure, on the first day after the caucus:

This is simply a reporting issue, the app did not go down, and this is not a hack or an intrusion. The underlying data and paper trail is found and will simply take time to further report the results.

Umm, well, maybe.  According to a report in left-wing ProPublica:

The IowaReporterApp was so insecure that vote totals, passwords and other sensitive information could have been intercepted or even changed, according to officials at Massachusetts-based Veracode, a security firm that reviewed the software at ProPublica's request. Because of a lack of safeguards, transmissions to and from the phone were left largely unprotected.

Chris Wysopal, Veracode's chief technology officer, said the problems were elementary. He called it a "poor decision" to release the software without first fixing them. "It is important for all mobile apps that deal with sensitive data to have adequate security testing, and have any vulnerabilities fixed before being released for use," he said.

Then there were the charges from Camp Bernie Sanders, which had every reason to think none of this was a bad code, a hack, or a Trumpian dirty trick, but more likely a rig.

Pete Buttigieg, who won the caucus by a narrow margin, just happened to be an investor in the company.

George Soros, through various shell companies, also seemed to have a hand in the whole thing.  You know that with Sanders's end-billionaires plan, he's sure to want someone else.  He's always been the Democratic establishment, and the Democratic establishment, as it's already known, isn't in for feeling the Bern.

There's also the actual operatives who created the app, vaunted whiz kids affiliated with the failed Hillary Clinton internet operation, skeezy tricksters such as Robbie Mook.  Those are the guys who created the app; it was their company, though Mook denies any involvement.  USA Today has reported that yes, Mook was involved.  So does the Des Moines Register.

Here's a choice tweet:

Looking forward to reading that libel complaint naming the Des Moines register as defendant then! https://t.co/RlJpDTGmcL pic.twitter.com/dkFXXbBirz

— Ryan Melyon (@RMelyon) February 4, 2020

It's all falling apart.  Democrat operatives with a history of gaming elections, and anti-Bernie factions such as Bernie's electoral competition, seem to have been caught in the act of trying to rig the results away from Bernie.  They were offered federal security, same as the hacked email accounts of the DNC had been, and surprise of surprises, this same Mook crew turned it all down. Wonder why.

Now they're watching the whole thing blow up in front of them.

That's led to their blaming of Trump for the whole mess, a sorry, sorry excuse that looks ridiculous in the wake of all the other evidence of incompetence and chicanery. The Trumpsters, see, are all powerful and knew that a flood of phone calls to the Iowa caucus counters was just the thing to create the crisis of confidence disaster the Democrats have going right now. And somehow, they had all the right numbers it took to dial in. Pay no attention to the bad app, the self-interests of the app makers, or the curious choice of personnel.

That's a good one. What would Democrats do without Trump? He seems to be their catch-all, carry-all program for evading any responsibility for their own failures, dating from Mook's Hillary plan and it's starting to get rancid out there.

Image credit: SparkCBC via Flickr, detail, CC BY-SA 2.0.