Democratic Party District Convention 08

Well, on Saturday I attended the Democratic Party District convention (NC Congressional District 11) at Haywood College. We got there plenty early, and I brought in my two 30 x 40 inch displays of recent pictures from Iraq. The top of the pieces were labeled “These are pictures of Iraq from May 2008”. My intention was to let people know that this war and occupation of Iraq is still raging, even if our media does not cover it. The pictures I used can be seen on the Faces of Grief blog.

I tried to get elected as a delegate to the Electoral College, but lost out on that vote. I might try again at the state convention.

We had several votes to elect delegates to the Democratic Party National Convention in Denver. Considering that everyone has to pay their own way and it will cost them a small fortune, I was surprised that so many people actually want to go. That voting took a fairly long time. On the Clinton side, they have a few “write-in” candidates, one of whom was elected as an alternate. So, even though that person was elected, she cannot be seated unless the Clinton campaign approves. There are a bunch of people there that supported Clinton and seemingly don’t know that she will not get the nomination.

Then we discussed and voted on resolutions. They split them into three lists – uncontested, debatable, and inappropriate (meaning that they either were local county issues or actually were unconstitutional). Some were moved from the uncontested to the debatable column, including my resolution on helping the Iraqi immigrants. So, when the time came, I spoke about how the Iraqi refuges are in dire shape, how the US is not helping them, and how the US is not meeting it’s meager goals for admitting refugees into the US. I mentioned how Sweden has admitted ten times more candidates than the US has, and how the vast majority of these refugees are not going home, ever. My resolution asked for support for Rep. Water’s resolution to meet our immigration goals and help these people out. I also mentioned that I follow the news on Iraq closely – I believe I mentioned that right at the start.

So, some guy gets up and says that he watches the news on Iraq also. Of course, to those of us who are actually informed, we know full well that he might as well held up a sign that says “I am totally uninformed” because he used the word “watches”. If he is getting information from the TV, he is almost totally clueless. However, he did know that the Iraqi government now has a surplus… a pretty big surplus, from oil sales. And he knew that the Iraqi government is not spending that money to help Iraqi refugees at all (most likely, because bush told maliki not to do so – admitting so many Iraqis have left their homes (or sometimes the entire country) really does not speak to “success” with the surge). And that bit of information was enough for the people there to vote down help Iraqi refugees in Iraq and the Middle East. He also made the claim that we should not increase the Iraqis come to the US – I believe he said that they should stay in Iraq and build their own country.

So, the resolution was defeated. Ignorance and xenophobia won out. However, over in congressional district #4, the resolution passed – and I bet it will pass on the state level too. And that’s because there are more smart people in NC than dumb people, although this is not true in my part of the state.

And, just to show you that some folks WILL wake up (but it may take awhile) – this year Max Haner got up and spoke for impeachment of bush and cheney. I felt like standing up and yelling HALLE-FUCKING-LUJAH! Max was the former chair of the Democratic Party in Buncombe County. We passed a resolution to impeach bush, cheney and Gonzales on the state level in 2005. We passed a resolution for the NC House of Representatives to file articles of impeachment in 2006. In 2007, I was told that they would not consider my resolution to impeach bush and cheney because ‘it was already done before’….. so I didn’t even bother to bring it up again. And here is Max, standing there telling people that we had better impeach these guys, even if it is not successful, because history will record that we did not even try, if we fail to do this. In short, he said that we have to show history that we recognized that these guys did things that were very, very wrong. Well, better late than never, but I sure wish he had started pushing for impeachment in 2005. And I think that if we had pursued impeachment in 2005 or 2006 or 2007 – it would have been successful.

I hope it is not too late.

Hallelujah