The Man Without a Face — or in Dick Tracy Parlance perhaps “Blank Face” — (or is it “The Shadow”)

— has been given a face in the National Journal rankings.

Before.  After.

I maintain my belief that there’s no reason he shouldn’t be seen as ahead of Biden, Kucinich maybe, Vilsack maybe, and I find this whole thing specious.

I also wonder if there was some type of memo that was passed out that decided to give him a face.

A fairly reprsentative and typical quote from Dennis Kucinich from 2004: 

Ralph Nader’s candidacy proves why the Democrats need me to win the White House. Because I’m the one that can attract Greens, natural law party members, Libertarians and reform party members, and create this great united effort to take back the White House not just for the Democrats, but for the American people.

Add “blue collar Reagan Democrats” to the mix in some quotes, perhaps even in this one in an earlier part of the interview.  There’s a certain unreality to the man, which showed itself again in explaining how he was going to win the nomination, even as Kerry was racking up delegates, which was the Nominating Convention would be dead-locked and the War in Iraq would be the defining issue which would throw Kucinich the nomination.  Well, whatever keeps one and one’s supporters motivated, I suppose.

But.  Really?  He’s going to attract the Natural Law Party members?  Add the Natural Law Party voters to the Democratic voters and that adds up to a Democratic Victory?  Can he also find a way of appealing to the Peace and Freedom Party just to get enough of a landslide to coat-tail in a Senate majority?

From Mike Gravel’s April 2006 appearance on the quasi-debate quasi-two sided program “HANNITY & colmes”.

…………

HANNITY: Let me ask you about this. You have talked extensively and have been quoted fairly extensively about the idea of a world government.  Do you really believe we ought to have a world government?

GRAVEL: Not right now. We’re not mature enough to handle something like that.

HANNITY: That’s not — I don’t care if not right now. Wait a minute — in principle, in principle, do you support the idea of a world government?

GRAVEL: No, I support the idea of having world peace. Do you know a way how you’re going to have world peace?

HANNITY: That’s not what you said. You said, “A world government,” you said, is something that you would support. Hang on. You said everybody talks about world government in academic theory, you said. But you support it.

GRAVEL: Listen, Sean, I don’t support it right now. I just told you that.

HANNITY: Will you support it later, then?

GRAVEL: How many times do I have to repeat that? Here, first off, we know that if we’re going to ever arrive at peace, we need some type of global governance. Overall. But we’re not mature enough to get it. And how we’re going to get there is — how we’re going to get there is we’re going to get there by empowering the people to make laws in the United States — wait a second, Sean.

HANNITY: But this is an important point.

GRAVEL: After that, it — in the United States, it will go around the world like wildfire.

HANNITY: This is an important — hang on. Wait a minute. Hang on a second.

GRAVEL: Now, once we have a situation…

HANNITY: I want to get this in. Mike, hang on…

GRAVEL: What is it, Sean?

HANNITY: I want to get this in, because this is important. This is important, because the idea you don’t support it now, can’t happen now, but in principle, you really want to move towards a world government. You know what most Americans think when they hear that?

GRAVEL: What?

HANNITY: We’re going to give up our identity, our sovereignty to a governing body that will be as corrupt as the United Nations. Do you really want to do that?

GRAVEL: Wait a second. Sean, how could you make a jump from an organization that is based upon the people rather than nation states? What you’re supporting is the continuation of the nation states.  All I’m saying is we are not mature enough as Americans or in any other country right now to have any real global governance.

…………

There is a bit of a pattern I see from Mike Gravel in his “Philadelphia 2” projects.  The reason that the National Initiative Program will not have the same faults as the State Initiatives is because the State Initiative is controlled by the state and this will be controlled by the people— although he seems to be indicating in this election that his visions of the National Initiative are not as Utopian as he had them in the past and now his argument is that the State Initiatives work pretty well.  The One World Government, which is entirely missing from his presidential platform but he’s advocated in the past and I’m sure I can look up and find some of Mike Gravel’s literature if I wanted to on the web, will not have the same faults as current world global entities — like the UN — because those are controlled by the nation states and the One World Government will be run by the people.  I don’t really know what this means.  His ideas are interesting to me, and I would like to subscribe to his newsletter.
What else are we left with here?  I don’t know.  You decide, I suppose.

Incidentally, I’m a bit chagrined.  I’ve moved up on google from #14 to #13 to #11.  Goddamned it, how much more can I possibly have to say about Mike Gravel?

I find myself looking at the situationwith Iran from a few different vantage points, imposing a number of different frames, and coming out with absurdities.

Take everything at face value.  The US is helping the Iraqis set up a representative sovreign government, a government which has made friendly agreements with the Iranian government of various security and economic varieties.  It is in the interest of the Iraqi government’s attempts to stabilize itself to do so (“Shiite Crescent” not withstanding).  At the same time, the long rumored war plans against Iran are, apparently, in an early stage of implementation.  And so goes the absurdity and the irony.  I see a box bulging, unable to be tied together because of the huge volume of odd-fitting inconsistencies.  It’s not a pretty sight.

Move at a different angle, and throw some parts of the puzzle away.  This becomes a resumption of the Iraq – Iran War, with the US once again taking the side of the Iraqis, who — are killing the Iraqis.  Kind of.  Therein was that now famous Rumsfeld — Hussein photograph.  There was a minor diversion to Iran with the Iran – Contra Affair, but that was in pursuit of bigger enemies over in our hemisphere — those goddamned Central American Commies.  I have to shift some things around to make this make any sense, because the “devices” (and Bush keeps using the word “devices”, which I guess creates some leeway in the charges against Iran) are used against — Sunnis, more or less, I presume, and Americans — Americans not having been in the crossfire of the Iraq – Iran War because we had the good sense of not being present where the fighting was at that time, and the Sunnis being the ruling sect — Saddam Hussein privileging his own kind.

No.  I can’t tie it together there either.

Jim Webb:  And you know, one thing, if you look at where we are in the Persian Gulf right now, when I was Secretary of the Navy and until very recently, we never operated carrier — aircraft carriers inside the Persian Gulf because, number one, the turning radius is pretty close, and number two, the chance of accidentally bumping into something that would start a diplomatic situation was pretty high. We now have been doing that, and with the tensions as high as they are, I’m very worried that we might accidentally set something off in there and we need, as a Congress, to get ahead of the ballgame here.

AND, from Newsweek:

At least one former White House official contends that some Bush advisers secretly want an excuse to attack Iran. “They intend to be as provocative as possible and make the Iranians do something [America] would be forced to retaliate for,” says Hillary Mann, the administration’s former National Security Council director for Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs. …

A second Navy carrier group is steaming toward the Persian Gulf, and NEWSWEEK has learned that a third carrier will likely follow. Iran shot off a few missiles in those same tense waters last week, in a highly publicized test. With Americans and Iranians jousting on the chaotic battleground of Iraq, the chances of a small incident’s spiraling into a crisis are higher than they’ve been in years.

AND

Some senior administration officials still relish the notion of a direct confrontation. One ambassador in Washington said he was taken aback when John Hannah, Vice President Cheney’s national security adviser, said during a recent meeting that the administration considers 2007 “the year of Iran” and indicated that a U.S. attack was a real possibility. Hannah declined to be interviewed for this article.

“The Year of Iran”?  I thought it was “The Year of the Bear”?

This has been a long time in coming.  The rumors have always been easily brushed aside quite easily by the simple fact that dates have kept being assigned which have passed into oblivion.  Thus, that bizarre October blast from Pravda — ie: Fox News — where everyone on the Fox News channel for a few days blasted away at Iran was easily passable as electioneering — churning out the base and a bit beyond.

Maybe we oughta make any further movement on this scene an Impeachable Offense.  We should be allowed to define those terms of what falls under that category, right?  Nay.  Let’s just pass a non-binding “Sense of the Congress” Resolution.  That’ll work!

To explain my ground rules of this long series of Mike Gravel related posts:   I am making it a habit to track the google ratings for Mike Gravel.  As soon as this blog falls onto page 3 of google searches, Mike Gravel will become incognito, and I may well make a concerted effort to never mention him again.  So long as Mike Gravel remains on page one or two, I will oblige with a steady stream of Mike Gravel posts.  I am currently falling, and have slipped from #9 to #11 to #14.  This suggests that I will be done with Mike Gravel by the end of the week.  This is good, because so far as I can tell I only have a couple more things to say about Mike Gravel.

I will note that there is another Mike Gravel who is mucking up the process.  I almost want to send him a missive to yell “Hey!  You’re not the former Senator of Alaska and long-shot presidential candidate!”

— Plunderer and Rapist of the Earth.

There is something about Ralph Nader’s quasi-endorsement of Mike Gravel.  Not withstanding that I don’t think Mike Gravel’s tax views mesh with Nader’s, though I could be wrong (the last president or major presidential candidate to advocate a national sales tax was Herbert Hoover, incidentally — at which point in time the decision was codified to assign the sales tax as a purview of the state government).  But Mike Gravel ated as one may expect an Alaskan politician to act concerning the Alaskan wilderness — Develop it and wage battle against the National Government over there in Washington and the Environmentalists’ land grabs — A Fight For ALASKA, mind you, Defending ALASKA.

Understand that Mike Gravel’s last fight in the Senate put him at odds with fellow Senator Ted Stevens, who had a compromise bill worked out concerning these issues, and who Grael accused of bowing too far to the will of the Environmentalist Lobby.  Understand too that Mike Gravel strung this fight out for the entire session, grandstanding for craven political advantage in the run-up to the 1980 election — where he was already tagged as the most vulnerable Incumbent.  Actually, had Mike Gravel’s re-election come up in any other way beside the Watergate year of 1974, where he was the only realistic Republic Senate pick-up possibility, Gravel would have been a one-term Senator.  Thus, the need for theatrical grandstanding on behalf of defending Alaska against the Federal government and those elitist environmentalists.

But maybe, in the eyes of Ralph Nader, you can place his positioning as ending up where the Environmentalist Community were: opposed.  The Center, as defined by Ted Stevens, will not hold, and around the edges you find the common ground.

From Ron Guzenburger, we get this bit of news:

Two prominent black elected officials in South Carolina — State Senators Robert Ford and Darrell Jackson — endorsed US Senator Hillary Clinton on Tuesday. The influential duo told the AP they were courted by Senator Obama, but decided to endorse Clinton because they want the Democrats to win in November. “I love Obama, but I’m not going to kill myself … Everybody else on the ballot is doomed [if Obama wins the nomination]. Every Democratic candidate running on that ticket would lose because [Obama] is black and he’s at the top of the ticket — we’d lose the House, the Senate and the Governors and everything,” said Ford. Just imagine the backlash if a white politician had made those same remarks.

Well.  I have a gut feeling that  Ford and Jackson may be projecting their experiences with racism on to what White America is going to think of Obama.  It’s not so much that they are “under-estimating” White America as they may fail to see how we’ve latched onto Barack Obama because he soothes us of our lily-white guilt.

Or maybe I’m not properly framing myself into South Carolina.  It’s easy for me to make that statement, sitting here in goddamned Portland, Oregon.  But, recently Harold Ford, Jr’s election loss tracked closely with the polls, which is in direct opposition to the “Doug Wilder Effect” which had the black Wilder winning the Virginia Governorship by a wide margin in the polls leading up to the election, and then… squeaking it out… the people were afraid to tell the pollsters they wouldn’t vote for a black man.  Which tells us that we as a nation made progress to the point where we will state an opinion on Barack Obama — and not hide from it, so we can take the current adulation of Barack Obama at face value.
The one good thing about both both Hillary Clinton’s presidency and Barack Obama’s presidency is that it forces us to confront both our assumptions of race and gender and, somewhat more importantly, what we think the public’s assumptions of race and gender are in trying to assuage what they would vote for, which doubles right back on ourselves. Parenthetically, the bad thing about Hillary Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s presidency is slicing away those concerns we’re back to the question of: Do we really want either of these two to be president, and if we balk at them (the Democratic electorate deciding they’re not in tune with Clinton for her war stance and DLC positioning, the nation deeming her a flip-flopper and opportunist, the nation deciding that Obama is just a little too green) does that really say anything about anything here?
For example, Hillary Clinton is said to have more support amongst black Americans than Barack Obama because of how the Clintons connected with the black community in their White House.  This comes from the odd fact that Bill Clinton, coming from a relatively poor background in Arkansas, has in many ways a more relatable experience to them than Barack Obama — who is quite literally an African American (father is from Kenya, mother is from America), and whose formative experiences took him to Hawaii (not a racial, in terms of black and white, hotbed) and the upper berth in Kenya.  This does raise the interesting question about Hillary: last I checked, Hillary Clinton is not Bill Clinton.

As for gender:  Hillary Clinton’s voice is just grating.  Is that some weird gender bias, which is that when she yells she sounds shrill — like Nancy Pelosi can (but she can get away with it, because she’s not running for president and — Her Voice is not going to be taken as, for good or bad, a strangely sanctioned “Voice of America”.)

On Sunday, I listened to Mike Gravel being interviewed by — well, after This American Life ends at 11:00 am that godawful Car Duo comes on NPR, and a quick flick of the “am/fm” switch brings me to the local Air America affiliate, which has on… what’s it called?  Politically Direct.  With David Bender.  David Bender.  A weekend run-through of what is nationally a weekday hour long program.

A decent fellow, this Mike Gravel.  He gave what would, for good or bad, amount to his answers to some of my “10 Questions for Mike Gravel”, which probably isn’t even the 10 Questions I would post today anyway.

My not-particularly heartfelt propaganda of with preposterously lound angry titles has afflicted me.  I found myself grating my teeth when Mike Gravel reiterated that “nobody who voted for the Iraq War Resolution is qualified for the Presidency.”  Firstly, he listed Chris Dodd as one of those “fundamentally good people” he feels “heartbroken” for saying such a thing against, never mind he did vote no.  Secondly, his 1968 campaign against Ernest Gruening — one of two votes against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, was that of a professed hawk taking down a dove.  George McGovern even helped organize the campus – centered anti-war movement in Alaska to carry on with a write-in campaign for Gruening.  Had he been able to vote, Mike Gravel would have voted to escalate the Vietnam War on — probably up to when the Democratic Johnson made way for the Republican Nixon.  All I know for sure is it wasn’t the Pentagon Papers which shook Mike Gravel into opposing the Vietnam War, since Daniel Ellsburg already fingered him as one of the politicians to shop them to.

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander: anyone who all evidence points to as being a vote for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution is unqualified for the Presidency, never mind what political changes they make thereafter.  Or so should Mike Gravel’s logic work.
He has clearly heard the problems people have with his 22 percent national sales tax replacing the current income tax, as he expressly said “some liberals and progressives balk at it saying it’s a regressive tax”.  And he went on to argure that it’s an improvement over the current model because the rich can’t just plow through the codes and write their own tax code.  Again, this elicited in me a smirk:  Just like Ross Perot, huh?

Mike Gravel’s argument on behalf of the National Initiative, his pet cause and reason for being, seems to hinge on the denial that corporate interests really have taken over at state level initiatives, and the belief that the populace have shown themselves better stewards of the tax dollars than pandering elected officials.  The answer somehow just failed to connect with the question, and I’m left thinking that that something that may not be a bad idea is ultimately not the defintion of something that is a good idea.

When I tuned in, a few minutes into the program, I did not know who I was listening to and I couldn’t make him out.  His soliloquays about repairing our educational system for better connectedness and civic engagement, his comments on how no president has dared mention the Military Industrial Complex since Eisenhower left and his general dispensation to the period of political history from the New Deal to Kennedy struck me as a somewhat more nostalgic version of this type of wise elder statesman of the Left like Howard Zinn and (a bit more aristocratically) Gore Vidal and Lewis Lapham.  He clearly wasn’t any of them — nor was he Bill Moyers — his speech wasn’t as garbled.  Tending to tie strands of history into a bit of a knot, standing on a higher plane than the electoral politics that gets bogged down in temporal and passing fits of pettiness.  I don’t know  if this is a compliment or not, but it is what it is.

For what it’s worth, I don’t see any reason for those entities that chart those somewhat inane Horse Race “Power rankings” of which presidential candidate is up, or down, or sideways to stick Gravel — speaker at that recent DNC winter meeting of some words that at least reverberated to a few points out there — lower than some other candidates who aren’t about to be elected either.  Mike Gravel has to be higher than Joseph Biden or Tom Vilsack, right?

Coming soon: another preposterously angrily titled Mike Gravel entry, this one about his stances on the Environment.  He was an Alaskan politician, what do you think he did on that one?