Wednesday, August 07, 2019

Iraq snapshot

Wednesday, August 7, 2019.  Mike Gravel ends his campaign and endorses Bernie Sanders while, for too many others, the vanity campaigns roll on.


The nonsense never ends as the race fot the Democratic Party's presidential nomination takes place.  You've got the hysterical Neera Tanden clutching the pearls over Barack Obama (Republicans glorified Ronald Reagan! -- who the f**k cares?  Are we supposed to be Republicans?  We never glorified Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter.)

I'm sure your fam wasn't harmed by the Obama deportation machine. Mine was. Some of the fams of the ppl who were protesting Biden were. Stupid is running on a pro-immigrant platform, having an entire Democratic gov, not passing any legislation & instead deporting millions of us.




You've got so many weighing in when they know nothing.

For example, some are offended that Joe Biden is being forced to answer for the 1994 crime bill.  Bob Somerby's one of those.  He's whined about it here and here, for example.  Bob Somerby whimpers that others voted for it too!  Why are people so mean to Joe Biden when other people voted for it too!!!!

He sounds like the YOUTUBE crazy asking people to leave Britney Spears alone, doesn't he?

Stop the fake news, people.  Joe Biden's responsible for the 1994 crime bill and, if you don't believe me, why not believe Joe Biden himself?


July 24, 2007, candidate Joe Biden in "Fourth Democratic Debate" (transcript is THE NEW YORK TIMES' transcript):


And I do have -- I do have a record of significant accomplishment.  The crime bill, which became known as the Clinton crime bill, was written by Joe Biden, the Biden crime bill.  That required me to  cross over, get everyone together, not -- no one's civil liberties were in any way jeopardized.  We put 100,000 cops on the street.  Violent crime came down.  The Violence Against Women Act, what we did in Bosnia, and so on.  So I have a track record of being able to cross over and get things done.



"The crime bill, which became known as the Clinton crime bill, was written by Joe Biden, the Biden crime bill."  That's Joe speaking publicly in 2007.

Yeah, he deserves to be held accountable for the bill.  And he was happy to brag about it as late as 2007. 


  1. Joe Biden Must Face a Reckoning For His Role in Building Mass Incarceration "Biden was not just the primary author of the 1994 Crime Bill, he was the primary author of most so-called crime bills from the 1970s until 2008."

Joe Biden just said prisoners should be given access to resources when they step out of jail, like Pell grants, but Biden's 1994 crime bill literally took away Pell grants from felons.

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...if you author a crime bill that devastated an entire generation of young black men; if you fight instituting tools to help integrate schools; if you continue to put your hands and lips all over young women uninvited, you should reconsider your career path...

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shouldn’t support ’s candidacy! The Crime Bill resulted in the mass incarceration of ! This policy has generational consequences for the !


There is one less candidate running for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.



Mike Gravel has endorsed Bernie Sanders.


  1. "I am proud and honored to endorse Senator Bernie Sanders for the presidency of the United States."
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  2.   Retweeted
    This is why 's Bernie Sanders endorsement means so much. Here's Gravel breaking down while reading the 4,100 page Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record. He read past 1 AM. No other senators were left in the room. He wanted to make sure every word was recorded.


It is time for others to follow Mike's lead.  As we argued here on Sunday in "Talking entry" and at THIRD in "Editorial: Bye Tulsi" and "Joe Biden is not the answer," it's time for the vanity campaigns to close shop. Not only are you not going anywhere, you are keeping real candidates -- like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders -- from getting the time on the debate stage and in the media that they need to make important arguments.

Tulsi's campaign is going nowhere.  Gabbard should focus her efforts on re-election before that's completely off the table.  Her sole reason for being on the debate stage was to call out endless wars and those who brought us the endless wars.  She refused to do that last week in the debate and then, much worse, spent the following days minimizing War Hawk Joe Biden's actions and lying about him saying he was 'sorry.'  She achieves nothing on the stage of value.  Her vanity -- even her vanity -- should have vanished long ago as she saw no support.

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Unfortunately you refused to go after your friend on his disastrous Iraq vote and his warmongering leading up to the Iraq war. He was one of the main cheerleaders of the Iraq war! You blew a golden opportunity tonight to call him out on his warmongering!




I am against the forever wars -- and I can call out Joe Biden -- but Tulsi never had a chance.  People don't like her.  More to the point, college students didn't like her.  As I repeatedly noted in the last months, there were few Tulsi supporters on campuses.  We went all over the country except Alaska (we've even been to Puerto Rico this year speaking) and Tulsi has no base.  People don't like her.

Maybe she was too pretty to garner support?  It could be and if that helps her vanity and helps her move along to something else, Tulsi, you're too pretty.  They couldn't take you seriously because you were so pretty.

People did not take to her.  She got a spot on the stage at the June debate and at the July debate and neither appearance bumped her support levels.  But college students never liked her and that's really a warning sign because (a) her age should have made it much easier for her to communicate with them (she's only 38) and (b) the issue of the forever wars (and the hypocrisy that surrounds them) are issues that matter to college students.  But over and over, we have encountered campus anti-war activists who supported Bernie or Elizabeth.  A few have supported Beto.  A few are supporting Adam Kokesh -- who has gotten no corporate media coverage.  The day after the last debate, was there any network that didn't have Tulsi on?  And still the polls show no movement for her.

The vanity campaigns need to end.  That doesn't mean Tulsi will drop out.  We can't force her to.  You'd think her inability to get above 1% all of these months would have forced her to but apparently her vanity prevents both self-examination and embarrassment.  But if she cared about any cause that she pretends to, she'd be following Mike Gravel's lead and announcing she was closing her campaign and endorsing someone.


She'd probably endorse Joe Biden because that's how useless she is.  But she needs to end her vanity campaign.

. opposes war to his core that he voted for the Iraq War and even presented an award to a war criminal for endless war.


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