No, I'm not seriously advocating moving behind Senator Mike Gravel as the Dem candidate for 2008.
At the age of 77 he is past it and, moreover, he does hold rather weirdo economic theories.
Be that as it may, given the recent, shameful caving-in by Dems in Congress over a timetable for withdrawl from Iraq and their apparent unquestioning subservience to the lunacies of the War Prez, it might just make sense to give him some support, at least enough to enable his voice to be heard, so as to put the Dems in Congress to shame.
Those of us who belong to the Nam generation certainly remember that in his day Senator Mike Gravel was a man with balls:
In 1971, he 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.
If only the present-day eunuch Dems in Congress were similarly endowed!!!
Even today, he has no hesitation in calling it as he sees it, not least on the insanity of the Bush Iraq policies.
Perhaps the time has come to give him some support and his voice a chance to be heard, at least so as to give a wake-up call to and shake up the others?