Mike’s plan is to pass a law in the Congress making the war in Iraq illegal. Failure to comply with the law would be punishable by 5 years in jail without possibility of parole. Understand that the President of the United States is required to follow the law just as is any other American citizen.

Of course, once the law is passed by the House of Representatives and the Senate, it is likely that President Bush will veto it. Mike Gravel’s plan would call for the Senate and House Democratic leadership, Leader Harry Reid and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to bring the bill to a vote day after day, 7 days a week, 30 minutes per day, forcing the media spotlight to shine on those Senators and Congressman who are prolonging the war until pressure from their constituents produces a two-thirds majority sufficient to override the Presidential veto. (If the law is filibustered in the Senate initially, the same procedure would apply.)

What is important to understand is that Mike served two terms in the US Senate fighting for “unpopular” causes and winning against the odds. Mike is a legislative strategist and you will see that his plan for ending the war will work, if adopted. Most other options for ending the war fall into the “do the right thing” category or involve timelines that extend far off into the future. Rather than wait, let’s force our elected representatives to listen to the will of the American people by introducing Mike Gravel’s draft legislation, the United States Armed Forces Withdrawal from Iraq Act, and end this destructive and unnecessary war now.

Here’s a novel idea, someone in the congress, oops, I mean SOMEONE IN CONGRESS THAT STILL HAS BALLS, should insist that if by September, things in Eye-Rak are not much better, both houses will man up for a deployment “on the fucking ground”, In cammo, with real guns and 50 lb ruck sacks, and show those gol durned Eye-rakies how it’s done. The war would be de-funded in days.

When I was in high school and Vietnam was fully involved, one of my friend’s dad ( who happened to be from Iraq) told me that wicked old men will always get innocent young men to fight their wars. Damned if he wasn’t right.

Al Gore, in an EJ Dionne column Why Gore Won’t Run:

“They’re good people [the people running for President] trapped in a bad system,” he says, “and I think it’s the system that needs to be changed and I don’t see them changing it.” The campaign dialogue so far, he says, has not been “very enriching or illuminating” in “either party.”

Me, I’m keeping my Pelosi 07 shirt, and am going to work harder and smarter both to evict the Vichycrats and for systemic change. I’m not smart enough about what happened to outright condemn Reid or Pelosi (apparently unlike Keith Olbermann who struck me as being a bit unfair to the leadership), as I don’t know what they have to work with. I do know that the Democratic party has a lot of deadwood that has to go.

I will say that the Dems in general got spooked by the fact that Memorial Day is almost upon us, and Bush will surely use this to his PR advantage. I wonder how this game of chicken would’ve gone down were Memorial Day months away instead. Sad.

“If you have ever wondered how a serial murderer — a murderer who is sane and fully aware of the acts he has committed — can remain steadfastly convinced of his own moral superiority and show not even the slightest glimmer of remorse, you should not wonder any longer.”

“The United States government is such a murderer. It conducts its murders in full view of the entire world. It even boasts of them. Our government, and all our leading commentators, still maintain that the end justifies the means — and that even the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocents is of no moral consequence, provided a sufficient number of people can delude themselves into believing the final result is a “success.”

“We are a nation that has voluntarily renounced all its most crucial values, and all its founding principles. We can appeal all we want to “American exceptionalism,” but any “exceptionalism” that remains ours is that of a mass murderer without a soul, and without a conscience. We have destroyed the most basic foundation of liberty — and the nature and meaning of our act has already, in less than a couple of weeks, almost entirely vanished from public discussion. It is useless to appeal to any “American” sense of morality: we have none. It does not matter how immense the pile of corpses grows: we will not surrender or even question our delusion that we are right, and that nothing we do can be profoundly, unforgivably wrong.”