Yes, As You Already Know, Alan Grayson Is Running For Congress Again... Thank God

DWT readers who pay attention-- even a little attention-- are aware that Alan Grayson is running for Congress again. For one thing, Blue America endorsed him and has been raising money for his campaign. So far 77 Blue America members have contributed. I hope more start doing so when Alan makes his official announcement in a couple of weeks. Yesterday, though, FloridaPolitics.com did some sleuthing and announced that he definitely is running and raised $192,000 in the first quarter. They even quote Grayson: "I am running for the U.S. House of Representatives."

Grayson, who served one term representing Florida’s 10th Congressional District and two representing Florida’s 9th Congressional District in Central Florida, is officially filed to run in Florida’s 11th Congressional District this time. However, he has insisted for more than a year that is just a holding spot for his paperwork, so that he can raise money while assessing his options.

In the latest reports, Grayson’s committee raised $192,018, including $71,358 in contributions so small that they need not be itemized. The committee also spent $53,567, and entered April with $694,967 in the bank.

The progressive Democratic hardliner pointed out that, thanks in part to redistricting, he has represented constituents now scattered about six different congressional districts, including CD 11, CD 10, and CD 9, as well as Florida’s 6th, 7th, and 8th Congressional Districts.

His last two terms were in CD 9, which now covers south Orange County, Osceola County and eastern Polk County, and now is represented by Democratic U.S. Rep. Darren Soto. Soto’s campaign has been bracing for him to put up a primary challenge there.

Grayson’s first term was in CD 10, now covering western Orange County and now represented by Democratic U.S. Rep. Val Demings.

CD 6, now stretching from south of Jacksonville through Volusia County and into Lake County, is likely to be an open seat as Republican U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis is running for governor.

CD 8, mostly in Brevard County with a sliver of eastern Orange County is represented by Republican U.S. Rep. Bill Posey.

CD 7, covering Seminole and north and central Orange counties, is now represented by Democratic U.S. Rep. Stephanie Murphy.

CD 11, where Grayson is currently filed, covers north-western Lake County and west-central Florida stretching to The Villages and Spring Hill, and is represented by Republican U.S. Dan Webster, who beat Grayson in the 2010 election.

You may recall that it was Grayson who put together the bipartisan coalition that prevented Obama from bombing Syria. That when he was in Congress. Now that he's running, this is what he had to say about Trump going ahead and doing it in a pique of rage about the Putin-Gate investigations-- and without congressional approval.

After repeated warnings that he would huff and puff and blow Assad’s house down, President Angry McDunce lobbed a 70-minute volley of missiles at Syria, at empty targets, from a safe distance.

The military fired around half a billion dollars of Patriot missiles at three Syrian locations. Raytheon makes the Patriot missile, and the value of Raytheon’s stock jumped by... half a billion dollars. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

Whoa. That seems newsworthy, but it “somehow” didn’t make the news.

But... the deeper problem is not what has happened in the last 48 hours. That’s just the tip of the tip of the top of the iceberg. Actually, the cat is out of the bag, and the cards are on the table, and the horses have left the barn. President Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex has come true, we are engaged in military action and occupation all over the world, and no one pays any attention until President Bully O’Dimwit makes a speech about it at the dinner hour.

Wikipedia says that the U.S. military has 6350 troops in Syria, and that they’ve been there for almost four years. When did Congress authorize that? Did I miss the memo?

Are we really going to gnash our teeth and rend our itchy hair shirts over a missile attack on three empty targets? Maybe we should have said something when Syria was added to the “Lengthy List of Countries Voluntarily or Involuntarily Hosting Thousands of U.S. Combat Troops, As If It Makes a Difference to Our Leaders Which.”

For that matter, why did four U.S. combat troops die a few months ago in Niger, a place that POTUS doesn’t even know is a country? (He probably thinks that it’s a chic French restaurant in Soho.)  Niger?  Seriously, Niger?  No one goes there except to see the giraffes. CNN once broadcast a map of Niger, calling it Nigeria.  (This is true; Agence France-Presse once made a similar mistake, even though the place was a French colony for more than half a century.) If our esteemed news media can’t even find Niger on the globe, then why are there U.S. troops dying there? (And while we are on this subject, I’m pretty sure that dying a horrible death is Niger, of all places, is not what Sgt. La David Johnson “knew what he was signing up for,” to use Trump’s crass term.)

  Now that the CIA is running the drone program, you have to have access to classified information even to know on which countries we are dropping bombs. At least in the case of Syria, they had the courtesy to tell us.

And it costs us $2,000,000,000.00 each day for this.

The system is completely broken.  It was broken long before President Adolt Dreckfresser drew his red line in the desert sand, and then relieved himself over it. It’s time-- way past time-- that we started talking about it.

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See that thermometer on the right? You can use it to help Grayson get back into Congress. And then read this latest e-mail Grayson sent his supporters about the Syrian crisis:

Let us assume, arguendo, that Assad has ordered poison gas attacks on Syria civilian population, that the Syrian military carried out his orders in violation of the laws of war, and that the United States has a vital strategic interest to prevent this. All of these propositions are debatable, but let’s assume that they all are true.

OK, now what?

When this happened during the Obama Administration, the military presented a plan to Congress laying out military action intended to prevent another gas attack. Congress’s sub rosa response, in essence, was “no, no way, this won’t work.” So it didn’t even come to a vote, and there was no such attack.

A year ago, in very similar circumstances, President Dummkopf let loose in his usual incontinent fashion, and bombed an evacuated airfield. Which was put out of commission for several hours.

And that didn’t work. Or at least so it appears, because of a subsequent gas attack.

So, what does President Schmootzputz do now? The same thing, to three evacuated facilities. With the aid of two former colonial powers. (So France occupied Syria from 1920 to 1946, France is a NATO ally since 2009, France is now bombing Syria, and “therefore,” we can hope that Syria won’t use chemical weapons again? Huh? Double huh?)

But... the President called Assad an “animal.” Thus firmly rebutting the hypotheses that Assad is a mineral or a vegetable.

Look, if we’re going to spend half a billion dollars to blow up three empty buildings, could we have some skein of thought, some concatenation of syllables, some rationalization at least, that this “strategy” might conceivably accomplish its reputed goal?

Because otherwise, as Albert Einstein pointed out, doing the same thing over and over again, and hoping for a different result, is the definition of insanity.