Redstate

Well, he does have the Gravel-tas the people want in their President, doesn't he?

Hooray!

Now that would be surreal.

Mike Gravel's Army of Tomorrow parody (Rush Limbaugh Show)
http://mfile.akamai.com/5020/wma/rushlimb.download.akamai.com/5020/New/t...

This Mike Gravel?

"No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong." - Winston Churchill

Bluey, I can't for the life of me understand why the guy is running. As far as I'm concerned he's got nothing to offer. Yes, he appears to have been a competent mayor of a very large city. But that hardly qualifies him to run the nation especially in these critical times.

But really what turns me off him is that he's a LIBERAL...

The Weekly Standard did an excellent piece on him recently on why he should not run. Basically they argued that he should not run because, like I said above, he's got nothing to offer...

If he does actually run, he could turn out to be a spoiler candidate more for the GOP than for the Dems...

Love him or hate him, you'll want to take a look at this clip from an interview with him:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=mPDStnRCQ7c

is that at least he says what he really thinks, and he really seems to know that almost (and possibly all) of the other Democrats running for president are mealy mouthed politicians who will say anything to perpetuate the status quo in this country (See Clinton, Hillary for starters).

or more correctly for the AFL-CIO assigned to Gravel, in 1980. I learned a lot about campaign logistics; how to keep Woman A away from Woman C and Husbands B & D can be a real challenge! Gravel was the last Democrat holding federal office in Alaska and was the darling of organized labor. He and Stevens were locked in mortal combat over the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA). Stevens had eyes only for being Minority Leader and was playing "get along, go along" and urging passage. Even though a Democrat, Gravel wanted to kill it and see what the World would look like without Jimmy Carter. Gravel was very much right on that one and Stevens was very vulnerable for a while over his support for legislation that has been very damaging to Alaska. Ironically, had Stevens not been so friendly with the Democrats, he might well have been Majority Leader in '81.

Gravel knocked off Ernest Gruening, an Alaskan "founding father," in '68 by mounting the first true modern media campaign in Alaska. He teamed up with Joe Napolitan, a Matt Reese protege, and put together one of the first, maybe the first, minimum winning coalition, media driven campaigns in the Country. Napolitan's "The Election Game and How to Win It," featuring Gravel's Senate run, was the bible for campaign organization for years thereafter.

Mike was very much the self-styled maverick and some may recall his reading Ellsburg's leaked Pentagon Papers from the floor of the Senate. That didn't go over real well in a state that was heavily military and which was turning more Republican by the day. It wasn't stuff like that or the womanizing that got him, though. Gravel voted to authorize selling the then new F-15 aircraft to Saudi Arabia and that got him cross-threaded with Barney Gottstein, a devout Jew and supporter of Israel, who just happened to be, his family still is, the Democrat bank in Alaska. Gottstein swore to destroy Gravel over it and backed Clark Gruening, Ernest's grandson, in the Democrat Primary. Mike's controversial actions and womanizing - and Gottstein's money, caught up with him and Gruening won the Primary, though only to be slaughtered by Murkowski in the General.

Whatever else he was and wasn't, the guy was as good as I've ever seen working a crowd, simply a consumate hand-on campaigner - and supremely able to get his "hands on" any attractive woman that might be in that crowd. I do treasure the nearly a year I spent doing it; it convinced me to get out of organized labor and out of politics for a while. Armed with the courage of my connections, I set out to make some money and haven't looked back. Gravel was the last Democrat I voted for for a federal office and the next to the last Democrat I voted for at all.

In Vino Veritas

In New Hampshire, in the Democrat Spin Room, I actually listened to Mike Gravel talk a blue streak to a reporter for about five minutes concerning how the Administration (with the aid and abettance of the Congress) was absolutely, positively, beyond the shadow of a doubt, planning to invade Iran to distract from their failure in Iraq.

Gravel gives a paragraph to it on his website, but the understatement he makes there is no reflection of how deeply he believes it. He was *convinced* that the fix to invade Iran is in, and that it's all part of Dick Cheney's master plan for world domination.

After listening to his darkly conspiratorial tirade for almost five minutes, I actually suggested, tongue-in-cheek, that he form a joint Presidential ticket with Ron Paul. That got a *big* laugh out of Gravel, who said to me: "Ron Paul is more of a libertarian, but we have some things in common," which and he didn't completely discount it as a possibility!

If you got Mike Gravel into a quiet corner and ask him his views on the war and all kinds of other things, in complete candor, I wouldn't be surprised if you'd hear all kinds of amazing theories come out of his mouth.

He is, as Achance notes above:

Whatever else he was and wasn't, the guy was as good as I've ever seen working a crowd, simply a consumate hand-on campaigner - and supremely able to get his "hands on" any attractive woman that might be in that crowd.

How true. Gravel is avuncular, engaging, gregarious, and he absolutely draws people into his spiel. It's a gift. He's a consummate used-car/timeshare salesman crossed with a lobbyist crossed with a conspiracy theorist.

Is it just me, or would it be a fact that adding either Gore or Kerry or both to the Dhimmi-crat field would actually inject a measure of gravitas that is sorely lacking?

So I propose the Gore/Kerry ticket. Here's why I think it's a GREAT idea:
(1)The current field's top 3 are, in order, (a) a screeching and profoundly unlikeable Marxist whose husband screwed the staff, committed perjury, and pardoned terrorists in his stint,(b) a Nanny-State far-leftist stuffed shirt, with a resume consisting of 2 yrs of barely-noticed service in the US Senate, and (c) an ambulance chasing pretty-boy whose only accomplishment (besides bleeding the medical profession for 60mil or so) was a 1-term stint in the US Senate, where he would not have won re-election.

(2)Whereas with Gore and Kerry you have (a) a man with actually a heavy (ha, ha!!!) resume as a USS Senator and 8-yr Veep, and while a dull man, he is the baton-twirler for the Golbal Warming Crusade, the most obscenely nutty thing to sweep the world since Piltdown Man. Follow him with (b) again, a serviceable resume as a Navy hero who fought in the Nam (and in Cambodia!!), winning several medals. He has decades of service as a backbencher in the Senate, having co-sponsored at least 2 bills. He almost certainly committed treason by its legal definition, and with phony Senate testimony, gave the press-left the ammo they needed to ignomiously end the Vietnam war and spur the genocides that left millions dead in the region.

(3) Imagine if you will, a stump speech where Kerry bats leadoff, and Gore hits cleanup. Riveting, yes? Well, it still beats Clinton-Obama for fun, IMHO.

It's war -- so when can we start shooting back at the enemy Democrats?

...it is an "Open Thread"...

Are there islamofascist jihadists in YOUR neighborhood?

http://standeyo.com/News_Files/NBC/Terrorist_cells.html