Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Gravel to Gravel Coverage

I expect I'm not the only one who read the list of Democratic hopefuls scheduled to debate tomorrow and said Mike Gravel Who?

Here's Gravel's campaign website, and here's his bio.

I was going to make a joke that Gravelanche will be this year's Joementum, but there's no comparison between Senator Gravel and the lickspittle from Connecticut.

Gravel is best known (although not by me) for taking on Nixon on the Vietnam war:

In 1971, [Gravel] waged a successful one-man filibuster for five months that forced the Nixon administration to cut a deal, effectively ending the draft in the United States. He is most prominently known for his release of the Pentagon Papers, the secret official study that revealed the lies and manipulations of successive U.S. administrations that misled the country into the Vietnam War. After the New York Times published portions of the leaked study, the Nixon administration moved to block any further publication of information and to punish any newspaper publisher who revealed the contents.

From the floor of the senate, Gravel (a junior senator at the time) insisted that his constituents had a right to know the truth behind the war and proceeded to read 4,100 pages of the 7,000 page document into the senate record. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that Senator Gravel did not have the right and responsibility to share official documents with his constituents.

He then published The Senator Gravel Edition, The Pentagon Papers, Beacon Press (1971). This publication resulted in litigation, Gravel v. U.S., resulting in a landmark Supreme Court decision (No. 71-1017-1026) relative to the Speech and Debate Clause (Article 1, Section 6) of the United States Constitution.

Lieberman, of course, would say that Senator Gravel wanted the Vietnamese terrorists to succeed. Or send his Bullshit Mooseboy out to do it for him.

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