Waiting for the fun in Iowa to *finally* get underway last night, I couldn't help but fixate on the heartbreaking post-election mess in Kenya. I put together some thoughts for the Huffington Post attempting to connect the caucuses and the electoral failure in East Africa, a post that I was quite jazzed to see featured on the HuffPo politics homepage. (Woulda mentioned it here sooner, but I somehow managed to completely destroy nancyscola.com while nuking about 45,000 spam comments via MySql. Just finished a complete site rebuild, and all seems well.) Here's how that post begins:

As we come within mere hours of when the first Iowans will trudge into their caucus sites, the post-election horror engulfing Kenya puts the American presidential contest in sharp relief. The latest reports have upwards of 300 citizens killed. Yesterday's death-by-fire of 50 or so huddled in an Assemblies of God church near the Great Rift Valley city of Eldoret horrifyingly raises the specter of the 1994 Rwandan massacre of thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the Catholic Church at Nyarubuye.

The Kenya violence, as you might know, is fueled by anger over a flawed presidential contest that resulted in the tenuous reelection of Mwai Kibaki. President Kibaki is a Kikuyu, the ethnic grouping that serves as Kenya's elite; importantly, Kenya's first post-independence leader Jomo Kenyatta was Kikuyu. Kibaki's main challenger, businessman Raila Odinga, is Luo. And the Rift Valley church attackers reportedly included a number of Kalenjin; former President Daniel Arap Moi is Kalenjin and, under his presidency, that grouping was among Kenya's most-favored peoples.

Sure, Kenya's deeply-carved ethnic fault lines were no doubt the tinder for this conflagration. But the match was the suspicion that Friday's election was less than free, fair, and deserving of honest faith.