First Bomb Carter; Then Nuke Iran!
The Israel Lobby Trips and Tilts
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Suppose the movers and shakers in the Israel lobby here -- Abe Foxman, Alan Dershowitz and the rest of the crew -- had simply decided to leave Jimmy Carter’s Palestine Peace Not Apartheid alone. How long before the book would have been gathering dust on the remainder shelves? Suppose even that Dershowitz had rounded up his unacknowledged co-authors in all their tens of thousands and sallied forth to buy up every copy of Carter’s book and toss each one into the Charles River, would not that have been a more successful suppressor than the blitzkrieg strategy they did adopt?
Of course it would. For weeks now the lobby has hurled its legions into battle against Carter. He has been stigmatized as an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier, a patron of former concentration camp killers, a Christian madman, a pawn of the Arabs who “flatly condones mass murder” of Israeli Jews. (This last was from Murdoch’s New York Post editorial, relayed to its mailing list by the Zionist Organization of America.)
Any day now I expect some janitors at the Carter Center to resign, declaring that they can no longer in all conscience mop bathrooms that might have been used by the former President, their letter of protest duly front-paged by the New York Times, just like the famous fourteen members of the Carter Center’s Board of Councilors. Actually there were, at the time of resignations, 224 people on this board, where membership is mostly a thank you for a financial donation to the center. So the headlines could be saying, “Nearly 95 per cent of Carter Center Board Members Back Former President.”
But the assault on Carter is all to no avail. With each gust of abuse, Carter’s book soars higher and higher on the bestseller lists, reaching number 4 on Amazon itself. This doesn’t prove the lobby has no power. It proves the lobby can be dumb. Adroit lobbying consists in preventing unpleasing material reaching the light of day. Lobbying thrives in furtive darkness: slipping language into a bill at the last moment, threatening to back a campaign opponent, making quiet phone calls to the Polish embassy. Pressure is now being exerted on Farrar, Straus and Giroux to abandon its impending publication of Mearsheimer and Walt’s attack on the lobby.
The Israel lobby retains its grip inside the Beltway, but it’s starting to lose its hold on the broader public debate. Why? You can’t brutalize the Palestinian people in the full light of day, decade after decade, without claims that Israel is a light among the nations getting more than a few serious dents. In the old days, Mearsheimer and Walt’s tract would have been deep-sixed by the University of Chicago and the Kennedy School long before it reached its final draft, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux wouldn’t have considered offering a six-figure advance for it. Simon & Schuster would have told President Carter that his manuscript had run into insurmountable objections from a distinguished board of internal reviewers. But once a book by a former president with weighty humanitarian credentials makes it into bookstores, it’s hard to shoot it down with volleys of wild abuse.
The trouble with the lobby and the Christian zealots who act as its echo chamber is that they believe their own propaganda about Israel’s equitable social arrangements and immaculate political and legal record in its relations with the Palestinians. Use the word apartheid and they howl with indignation. The shock is about thirty years out of date. Israeli writers have used the word apartheid to describe arrangements in the occupied territories for years. Hundreds of prominent South African Jews issued a statement six years ago making the same link.
As in so many things, conventional elite opinion lives in a bubble, believing mere assertion and ranting about anti-Semitism will carry the day. The New York Times featured a spectacularly disingenuous hatchet job by its deputy foreign editor, Ethan Bronner, and another assault by former Clinton-era Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross. The latter rolled out the ritual accusations about Arafat’s rejection of Clinton’s proposals in December 2000, which is nonsense, as Ross surely knows. Clinton himself acknowledged in 2001 what later historians have substantiated, that both sides accepted his proposals in principle, while filing reservations. (Israel’s amounted to 20 single-spaced pages.)
The Times’ attacks were matched in the Washington Post by Jeffrey Goldberg, formerly of the IDF and a notorious trafficker in fictions, such as the supposed terror ties between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Amazon ran his vulgar ravings under the “Editorial Reviews” heading—a space usually reserved for short blurbs from Publishers Weekly and the like.
But if the lobby is fighting rearguard and increasingly futile actions to suppress all discussion here of what Israel is doing to Palestinians, it continues to exercise very serious clout in such enclaves of timidity as the U.S. Congress. Bush was not foolish in singling out Iran for threats in his January 10 address. The Democratic reaction to Bush’s escalation against Iraq and Iran has mostly been confined to nervous talk of “symbolic votes.” This temperate posture is surely not unconnected to the fact that the lobby’s prime foreign policy task, joined by Israeli hawks like Bibi Netanyahu, has been to rally support for an assault on Iran.
What an irony! Desperate for an end to the war, the voters hand Congress to the Democrats. Barely more than two months later Bush is kidnapping Iranian diplomats from in their consulate in Irbil, Iraq -- a calculated provocation arousing scant tumult here. Bush is also deploying a larger naval force to the Persian Gulf, as Israel plants stories about its possible recourse to nuclear weapons. Some provocation, maybe a seizure by the U.S. of an Iranian tanker, is easy to imagine in February. In the Congress, there’s barely a whimper out of the Democrats amid these terrifying prospects. It may have made a mess of its war against Carter’s book, but as a ferryman across the Styx toward Armageddon the lobby is doing a competent job.
Full Version: First Bomb Carter; Then Nuke Iran!
Common Ground Common Sense > National & International News > Op-Ed Articles from the Mainstream Media > Op-Ed Articles from the Mainstream Media Archive
QUOTE(Snuffysmith @ Jan 21 2007, 10:10 AM) 
First Bomb Carter; Then Nuke Iran!
The Israel Lobby Trips and Tilts
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Suppose the movers and shakers in the Israel lobby here -- Abe Foxman, Alan Dershowitz and the rest of the crew -- had simply decided to leave Jimmy Carter’s Palestine Peace Not Apartheid alone. How long before the book would have been gathering dust on the remainder shelves? Suppose even that Dershowitz had rounded up his unacknowledged co-authors in all their tens of thousands and sallied forth to buy up every copy of Carter’s book and toss each one into the Charles River, would not that have been a more successful suppressor than the blitzkrieg strategy they did adopt?
Of course it would. For weeks now the lobby has hurled its legions into battle against Carter. He has been stigmatized as an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier, a patron of former concentration camp killers, a Christian madman, a pawn of the Arabs who “flatly condones mass murder” of Israeli Jews. (This last was from Murdoch’s New York Post editorial, relayed to its mailing list by the Zionist Organization of America.)
Any day now I expect some janitors at the Carter Center to resign, declaring that they can no longer in all conscience mop bathrooms that might have been used by the former President, their letter of protest duly front-paged by the New York Times, just like the famous fourteen members of the Carter Center’s Board of Councilors. Actually there were, at the time of resignations, 224 people on this board, where membership is mostly a thank you for a financial donation to the center. So the headlines could be saying, “Nearly 95 per cent of Carter Center Board Members Back Former President.”
But the assault on Carter is all to no avail. With each gust of abuse, Carter’s book soars higher and higher on the bestseller lists, reaching number 4 on Amazon itself. This doesn’t prove the lobby has no power. It proves the lobby can be dumb. Adroit lobbying consists in preventing unpleasing material reaching the light of day. Lobbying thrives in furtive darkness: slipping language into a bill at the last moment, threatening to back a campaign opponent, making quiet phone calls to the Polish embassy. Pressure is now being exerted on Farrar, Straus and Giroux to abandon its impending publication of Mearsheimer and Walt’s attack on the lobby.
The Israel lobby retains its grip inside the Beltway, but it’s starting to lose its hold on the broader public debate. Why? You can’t brutalize the Palestinian people in the full light of day, decade after decade, without claims that Israel is a light among the nations getting more than a few serious dents. In the old days, Mearsheimer and Walt’s tract would have been deep-sixed by the University of Chicago and the Kennedy School long before it reached its final draft, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux wouldn’t have considered offering a six-figure advance for it. Simon & Schuster would have told President Carter that his manuscript had run into insurmountable objections from a distinguished board of internal reviewers. But once a book by a former president with weighty humanitarian credentials makes it into bookstores, it’s hard to shoot it down with volleys of wild abuse.
The trouble with the lobby and the Christian zealots who act as its echo chamber is that they believe their own propaganda about Israel’s equitable social arrangements and immaculate political and legal record in its relations with the Palestinians. Use the word apartheid and they howl with indignation. The shock is about thirty years out of date. Israeli writers have used the word apartheid to describe arrangements in the occupied territories for years. Hundreds of prominent South African Jews issued a statement six years ago making the same link.
As in so many things, conventional elite opinion lives in a bubble, believing mere assertion and ranting about anti-Semitism will carry the day. The New York Times featured a spectacularly disingenuous hatchet job by its deputy foreign editor, Ethan Bronner, and another assault by former Clinton-era Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross. The latter rolled out the ritual accusations about Arafat’s rejection of Clinton’s proposals in December 2000, which is nonsense, as Ross surely knows. Clinton himself acknowledged in 2001 what later historians have substantiated, that both sides accepted his proposals in principle, while filing reservations. (Israel’s amounted to 20 single-spaced pages.)
The Times’ attacks were matched in the Washington Post by Jeffrey Goldberg, formerly of the IDF and a notorious trafficker in fictions, such as the supposed terror ties between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Amazon ran his vulgar ravings under the “Editorial Reviews” heading—a space usually reserved for short blurbs from Publishers Weekly and the like.
But if the lobby is fighting rearguard and increasingly futile actions to suppress all discussion here of what Israel is doing to Palestinians, it continues to exercise very serious clout in such enclaves of timidity as the U.S. Congress. Bush was not foolish in singling out Iran for threats in his January 10 address. The Democratic reaction to Bush’s escalation against Iraq and Iran has mostly been confined to nervous talk of “symbolic votes.” This temperate posture is surely not unconnected to the fact that the lobby’s prime foreign policy task, joined by Israeli hawks like Bibi Netanyahu, has been to rally support for an assault on Iran.
What an irony! Desperate for an end to the war, the voters hand Congress to the Democrats. Barely more than two months later Bush is kidnapping Iranian diplomats from in their consulate in Irbil, Iraq -- a calculated provocation arousing scant tumult here. Bush is also deploying a larger naval force to the Persian Gulf, as Israel plants stories about its possible recourse to nuclear weapons. Some provocation, maybe a seizure by the U.S. of an Iranian tanker, is easy to imagine in February. In the Congress, there’s barely a whimper out of the Democrats amid these terrifying prospects. It may have made a mess of its war against Carter’s book, but as a ferryman across the Styx toward Armageddon the lobby is doing a competent job.
The Israel Lobby Trips and Tilts
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Suppose the movers and shakers in the Israel lobby here -- Abe Foxman, Alan Dershowitz and the rest of the crew -- had simply decided to leave Jimmy Carter’s Palestine Peace Not Apartheid alone. How long before the book would have been gathering dust on the remainder shelves? Suppose even that Dershowitz had rounded up his unacknowledged co-authors in all their tens of thousands and sallied forth to buy up every copy of Carter’s book and toss each one into the Charles River, would not that have been a more successful suppressor than the blitzkrieg strategy they did adopt?
Of course it would. For weeks now the lobby has hurled its legions into battle against Carter. He has been stigmatized as an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier, a patron of former concentration camp killers, a Christian madman, a pawn of the Arabs who “flatly condones mass murder” of Israeli Jews. (This last was from Murdoch’s New York Post editorial, relayed to its mailing list by the Zionist Organization of America.)
Any day now I expect some janitors at the Carter Center to resign, declaring that they can no longer in all conscience mop bathrooms that might have been used by the former President, their letter of protest duly front-paged by the New York Times, just like the famous fourteen members of the Carter Center’s Board of Councilors. Actually there were, at the time of resignations, 224 people on this board, where membership is mostly a thank you for a financial donation to the center. So the headlines could be saying, “Nearly 95 per cent of Carter Center Board Members Back Former President.”
But the assault on Carter is all to no avail. With each gust of abuse, Carter’s book soars higher and higher on the bestseller lists, reaching number 4 on Amazon itself. This doesn’t prove the lobby has no power. It proves the lobby can be dumb. Adroit lobbying consists in preventing unpleasing material reaching the light of day. Lobbying thrives in furtive darkness: slipping language into a bill at the last moment, threatening to back a campaign opponent, making quiet phone calls to the Polish embassy. Pressure is now being exerted on Farrar, Straus and Giroux to abandon its impending publication of Mearsheimer and Walt’s attack on the lobby.
The Israel lobby retains its grip inside the Beltway, but it’s starting to lose its hold on the broader public debate. Why? You can’t brutalize the Palestinian people in the full light of day, decade after decade, without claims that Israel is a light among the nations getting more than a few serious dents. In the old days, Mearsheimer and Walt’s tract would have been deep-sixed by the University of Chicago and the Kennedy School long before it reached its final draft, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux wouldn’t have considered offering a six-figure advance for it. Simon & Schuster would have told President Carter that his manuscript had run into insurmountable objections from a distinguished board of internal reviewers. But once a book by a former president with weighty humanitarian credentials makes it into bookstores, it’s hard to shoot it down with volleys of wild abuse.
The trouble with the lobby and the Christian zealots who act as its echo chamber is that they believe their own propaganda about Israel’s equitable social arrangements and immaculate political and legal record in its relations with the Palestinians. Use the word apartheid and they howl with indignation. The shock is about thirty years out of date. Israeli writers have used the word apartheid to describe arrangements in the occupied territories for years. Hundreds of prominent South African Jews issued a statement six years ago making the same link.
As in so many things, conventional elite opinion lives in a bubble, believing mere assertion and ranting about anti-Semitism will carry the day. The New York Times featured a spectacularly disingenuous hatchet job by its deputy foreign editor, Ethan Bronner, and another assault by former Clinton-era Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross. The latter rolled out the ritual accusations about Arafat’s rejection of Clinton’s proposals in December 2000, which is nonsense, as Ross surely knows. Clinton himself acknowledged in 2001 what later historians have substantiated, that both sides accepted his proposals in principle, while filing reservations. (Israel’s amounted to 20 single-spaced pages.)
The Times’ attacks were matched in the Washington Post by Jeffrey Goldberg, formerly of the IDF and a notorious trafficker in fictions, such as the supposed terror ties between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Amazon ran his vulgar ravings under the “Editorial Reviews” heading—a space usually reserved for short blurbs from Publishers Weekly and the like.
But if the lobby is fighting rearguard and increasingly futile actions to suppress all discussion here of what Israel is doing to Palestinians, it continues to exercise very serious clout in such enclaves of timidity as the U.S. Congress. Bush was not foolish in singling out Iran for threats in his January 10 address. The Democratic reaction to Bush’s escalation against Iraq and Iran has mostly been confined to nervous talk of “symbolic votes.” This temperate posture is surely not unconnected to the fact that the lobby’s prime foreign policy task, joined by Israeli hawks like Bibi Netanyahu, has been to rally support for an assault on Iran.
What an irony! Desperate for an end to the war, the voters hand Congress to the Democrats. Barely more than two months later Bush is kidnapping Iranian diplomats from in their consulate in Irbil, Iraq -- a calculated provocation arousing scant tumult here. Bush is also deploying a larger naval force to the Persian Gulf, as Israel plants stories about its possible recourse to nuclear weapons. Some provocation, maybe a seizure by the U.S. of an Iranian tanker, is easy to imagine in February. In the Congress, there’s barely a whimper out of the Democrats amid these terrifying prospects. It may have made a mess of its war against Carter’s book, but as a ferryman across the Styx toward Armageddon the lobby is doing a competent job.
A classic Cockburn column. It recall's this one to memory..
Dershowitz v Cockburn
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn10222005.html
QUOTE
One of the pleasures of life is taunting Alan Dershowitz. He rises to the bait like a trout in May. Here's the latest to-and-fro I've had with the nutty professor, published in the Nation last week.
First, the Dersh.
Cambridge, Mass.
Alexander Cockburn persists in lying about me. In his October 17 "Beat the Devil" column, "From Lynndie England to Shaquille O'Neal," Cockburn falsely claims that I have "clamored for torture." Cockburn knows full well that I "clamored" for just the opposite. As I wrote in my essay "Tortured Reasoning," which appeared in Sanford Levinson's book on Torture, "I am against torture as a normative matter, and I would like to see its use minimized. I pose the issue as follows. If torture is, in fact, being used and/or would, in fact, be used in an actual ticking bomb terrorist case, would it be normatively better or worse to have such torture regulated by some kind of warrant, with accountability, recordkeeping, standards and limitations?"
What I called for would have prevented precisely the sorts of claims that England made in her defense. Referring directly to Abu Ghraib, I conclude that "if a warrant requirement of some kind had been in place, the low-ranking officers on the ground could not plausibly claim that they had been subtly (or secretly) authorized to do what they did, since the only acceptable form of authorization would be in writing. Nor could the high-ranking officials hide behind plausible deniability, since they would have been required to give the explicit authorization."
This is surely different from clamoring for torture. Cockburn's false personal potshots cheapen The Nation's discourse and diminish its credibility.
Alan Dershowitz
Cockburn replies:
As regards Dershowitz's clamors for torture, lying is not necessary. The record suffices. Amid the post-9/11 debate about which bits of the Bill of Rights and the Geneva Conventions to heave overboard, there issued from the Felix Frankfurter professor at Harvard Law School the widely publicized message that it's okay to use torture, just so long as the torturers shoving a "sterilized needle"(the prof's preferred instrument under the fingernails of their victims have some sort of warrant in their pockets. So, at that Dershowitz called for regulated torture, which, contrary to his claims here, sought to make the outrageous normative, subject to rules, procedures, record-keeping, and so forth.
Thus poisoning the well with this decorous prattle Dershowitz was worse, in my view, than those who bellowed coarsely, "They're barbarians, we have to be too!" That latter idea bothers ordinary people, especially when they imagine their own sons and daughters thus launched into executive barbarism.
In fact, there was a "warrant requirement" of sorts at Abu Ghraib. It's just that no one could remember what it was. The soldiers who'd been at Guantánamo and Afghanistan could not remember that, though they did not have to abide by Geneva Conventions, according to Bush's February 7, 2002, directive and Gonzales's legal opinion re prisoners taken in the "global war on terror," they did have to apply Geneva to Iraqi prisoners. The widespread existence of this "confusion" is stated plainly in the Fay Report. Beyond that, Donald Rumsfeld drew up a list of approved procedures for interrogation at Gitmo on December 2, 2002. Six weeks later he rescinded those orders, allowing some of the procedures, all of which would be considered cruel and degrading treatment-torture-if you were on the receiving end, but not others. According to the Army's own investigations, soldiers aware of the first list (or warrant) were not always aware that it was later rescinded.
When those soldiers went to Iraq, they carried their "confusion" with them. In any event on September 14, 2003-following a visit to Abu Ghraib by Gen. Geoffrey Miller and a team from Gitmo there to evaluate the military's "ability to rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence" and make recommendations for same-Gen. Sanchez, then head of ground forces in Iraq, signed a policy outlining interrogation techniques that was very close to Rumsfeld's original list. Some of the techniques required specific approval from Sanchez before they could be used (another version of a warrant), and such requests were either made or they weren't (because of more confusion) but the existence of those procedures, limitations and record-keeping did not prevent torture. It merely normalized it.
At the time of the Abu-Ghraib pictures, there were anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 prisoners there. All over Iraq there were other detainees. Abuse has been reported everywhere, most recently in the allegations by Capt. Ian Fishback to Human Rights Watch and the Senate Armed Services Committee. Everywhere there were chaos, mortar attacks, fear, suspicion and soldiers short-handed, ill-equipped or bloody-minded, sometimes all of the above. The notion of applying judicious consideration re whom and how to torture under such conditions would be absurd if it were not already immoral and grotesque. Dershowitz's faith that higher-ups would actually put their names to such orders-rather than making their intentions clear in other ways-would, to plagiarize a Russian of vigorous views , be touching in a child but is repulsive in a person of mature years.
First, the Dersh.
Cambridge, Mass.
Alexander Cockburn persists in lying about me. In his October 17 "Beat the Devil" column, "From Lynndie England to Shaquille O'Neal," Cockburn falsely claims that I have "clamored for torture." Cockburn knows full well that I "clamored" for just the opposite. As I wrote in my essay "Tortured Reasoning," which appeared in Sanford Levinson's book on Torture, "I am against torture as a normative matter, and I would like to see its use minimized. I pose the issue as follows. If torture is, in fact, being used and/or would, in fact, be used in an actual ticking bomb terrorist case, would it be normatively better or worse to have such torture regulated by some kind of warrant, with accountability, recordkeeping, standards and limitations?"
What I called for would have prevented precisely the sorts of claims that England made in her defense. Referring directly to Abu Ghraib, I conclude that "if a warrant requirement of some kind had been in place, the low-ranking officers on the ground could not plausibly claim that they had been subtly (or secretly) authorized to do what they did, since the only acceptable form of authorization would be in writing. Nor could the high-ranking officials hide behind plausible deniability, since they would have been required to give the explicit authorization."
This is surely different from clamoring for torture. Cockburn's false personal potshots cheapen The Nation's discourse and diminish its credibility.
Alan Dershowitz
Cockburn replies:
As regards Dershowitz's clamors for torture, lying is not necessary. The record suffices. Amid the post-9/11 debate about which bits of the Bill of Rights and the Geneva Conventions to heave overboard, there issued from the Felix Frankfurter professor at Harvard Law School the widely publicized message that it's okay to use torture, just so long as the torturers shoving a "sterilized needle"(the prof's preferred instrument under the fingernails of their victims have some sort of warrant in their pockets. So, at that Dershowitz called for regulated torture, which, contrary to his claims here, sought to make the outrageous normative, subject to rules, procedures, record-keeping, and so forth.
Thus poisoning the well with this decorous prattle Dershowitz was worse, in my view, than those who bellowed coarsely, "They're barbarians, we have to be too!" That latter idea bothers ordinary people, especially when they imagine their own sons and daughters thus launched into executive barbarism.
In fact, there was a "warrant requirement" of sorts at Abu Ghraib. It's just that no one could remember what it was. The soldiers who'd been at Guantánamo and Afghanistan could not remember that, though they did not have to abide by Geneva Conventions, according to Bush's February 7, 2002, directive and Gonzales's legal opinion re prisoners taken in the "global war on terror," they did have to apply Geneva to Iraqi prisoners. The widespread existence of this "confusion" is stated plainly in the Fay Report. Beyond that, Donald Rumsfeld drew up a list of approved procedures for interrogation at Gitmo on December 2, 2002. Six weeks later he rescinded those orders, allowing some of the procedures, all of which would be considered cruel and degrading treatment-torture-if you were on the receiving end, but not others. According to the Army's own investigations, soldiers aware of the first list (or warrant) were not always aware that it was later rescinded.
When those soldiers went to Iraq, they carried their "confusion" with them. In any event on September 14, 2003-following a visit to Abu Ghraib by Gen. Geoffrey Miller and a team from Gitmo there to evaluate the military's "ability to rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence" and make recommendations for same-Gen. Sanchez, then head of ground forces in Iraq, signed a policy outlining interrogation techniques that was very close to Rumsfeld's original list. Some of the techniques required specific approval from Sanchez before they could be used (another version of a warrant), and such requests were either made or they weren't (because of more confusion) but the existence of those procedures, limitations and record-keeping did not prevent torture. It merely normalized it.
At the time of the Abu-Ghraib pictures, there were anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 prisoners there. All over Iraq there were other detainees. Abuse has been reported everywhere, most recently in the allegations by Capt. Ian Fishback to Human Rights Watch and the Senate Armed Services Committee. Everywhere there were chaos, mortar attacks, fear, suspicion and soldiers short-handed, ill-equipped or bloody-minded, sometimes all of the above. The notion of applying judicious consideration re whom and how to torture under such conditions would be absurd if it were not already immoral and grotesque. Dershowitz's faith that higher-ups would actually put their names to such orders-rather than making their intentions clear in other ways-would, to plagiarize a Russian of vigorous views , be touching in a child but is repulsive in a person of mature years.
Say what you will about Counterpunch. The last few years they got a hell of lot more things right than the NYT and WAPO.
They are stealing our country from us, sending our children to die, stop rolling over them, and stand up and fight. Give them their comeuppance, instead of more of our kids lives. Our "leaders" will find that standing and fighting for us is difficult when they are on their knees. As long as thats true, we should turn 'em out.
So far none of the announced Democrats is ready to get off their knees. I will keep waiting until someone really stands up.
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