How did I miss Mike Gravel? We sent the Pink Raygun Geek Survey to his campaign, but since then he’s completely fallen off my radar and, until I saw him on Real Time with Bill Maher last night, I thought he had dropped out of the race.
This is a guy who, in the 1970s, did a lot of stuff to piss off the federal government and both political parties because, as he says it, it was the right thing to do.
He read the Pentagon Papers – document that proved the government had lied about the Vietnam War – into the public record.
He filibustered the end of the draft.
He stopped nuclear testing in the North Pacific.
He introduced legislation to open diplomatic ties with China.
So, why is the media ignoring this guy? Is it because he’s not as photogenic as Barack Obama? Is it because he’s not a polarizing figure like Hillary Clinton? Is it because he’s not campaigning in the midst of personal tragedy like John Edwards?
Sure, he’s old and grumpy and grandfatherly, but he’s also not a robot. He seems to have genuine emotion while talking about things like Iraq and Vietnam. The other candidates sound like a pre-emotion chip Lt. Commander Data.
The media has a responsibility to deliver unbiased information to the public. The media has no right to decide for us which candidates we get to see, and by shoving candidates like Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul off to the side, that’s exactly what the media is doing.
By not providing equal coverage, the media is not only spitting in the collective face of America’s voters, they are also obstructing democracy.
That, combined with our horrible education system and rampant anti-intellectualism, creates a complacent population.
And that scares the hell out of me.
Score
The United States of Mis-Information: 1 Geeks: 0
Lisa Fary's earliest influences are Princess Leia, Rainbow Bright, Astronaut Barbie, and her 6th grade teacher, Ms. Palmer. She's angry that it's 2011 and she still doesn't have a hovercraft, but will accept a jetpack as consolation. That jetpack had better be pink with a rhinestone monogram. 
Mike Gravel will be President only if he is nominated by the Democratic party, and he will be nominated only if *you the reader* register Democrat and vote for him in the primary.
Most people don’t vote in the primaries, so Mike can stage a coup with your support. Imagine the message we’ll be sending to the politicians and big business, that we’re waking up and our minds are no longer for sale!
I fail to see the wisdom in voting for a man who, on this very same program last night, suggested pulling our military out of Iraq completely and seeking the help of Iran and Syria in securing Iraq as a sovereign nation. I respect Gravel’s record, but this kind of talk is at best applause-baiting and at worst asinine. The problems in Iraq come not from the presence of our military, but from the mismanagement of the war. And I can think of no worse mismanagement than to invite a tyrannical, theocratic state like Iran to come in and pick up the pieces of our own mess–leaving the freethinking people of Iraq and Kurdistan to the murderous, fanatical whim of Jihadists. Instead of throwing all your eggs into a presidential basket, why not “send a message” by not re-electing members of Congress who are on the take from businesses big or small, and then consider voting for a presidential candidate who understands the complexities of foreign policy in the Middle East?
it’s funny that you single out iran when they are the most democratic country in the middle east. the president and the people are much in a state like we are with Bush. the way bush keeps egging them on just makes them polarize behind their president.
the war is not mismanaged, it is a complete failure from beginning to end, whenever that end is to come. there is no chance to win because it is already lost so stop the murdering of soldiers and Iraqis with our pointless occupation. if we ever get to a point that bush would be able to call it a win, that point would be when the entire population of Iraq was exterminated in a complete genocide. Iraqis are the ones fighting us so to win means wiping out their full population!
The Shah of Iran has supreme power over the country, mandated for life. So much for Democracy. And the elected president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, aside from belonging to an apocalyptic sect of Islam and being one of the terrorists who took American hostages thirty years ago, has detained and tortured several supposed agitators both foreign and domestic. What a reasonable-sounding person.
The war is a failure, but it has nothing to do with genocide. The real tragedy here is that Saddam wasn’t taken out during Desert Storm. Instead, we left him in power to commit the genocide of which you accuse Bush. Don’t forget, it was Saddam who gassed the secular, democratic Kurds, and it was he who murdered them with attack helicopters with Bush Sr.’s permission.
Bush Jr. tried to set up a puppet “democracy” in the new Iraq and failed. Thus, my accusation of mismanagement. It’s a failure not of the military, which has done its job, but of the concept of Realpolitik, which has proven itself cynical and counterproductive. Realpolitik is why we supported Saddam in the first place. At the very least, we should make an effort to clean up our own mess.
We may very well have to pull our military out of the country, but to suggest we should completely abandon the Iraqi people to local warlords and theocrats is shameful.
Correction. Instead of Shah, I should have said Ayatollah. And the state religion of Iran is Shi’a Islam. Such a shining light of freedom.