Against Peace
Local Democrats were justifiably pissed last week after the King County Dems Executive Board nixed the anti-Israeli-occupation plank that delegates had passed two weeks earlier at the county convention. But no one seemed to notice that the board had added an annoying item to the Democrats' program as well: At the behest of well-organized Dennis Kucinich delegates, the board resolved to support Kucinich's kooky call for a Department of Peace.
Kucinich's brainchild, the dopey Department of Peace (let's call it the DOP), has now made it onto the state Dems' draft platform, which is up for ratification this weekend. If people were worried that screechy Howard Dean was going to jeopardize the party with angry antiwar rhetoric, they should be flat-out mortified about the direction in which Kucinich's eager delegates are nudging the party. The Kucinich crowd seems intent on positioning the Ds in the same galaxy as the Raelians.
Listen to Shaman Kucinich talk about the DOP: "We can conceive of peace as... the presence of the capacity for a higher evolution of human awareness... to tap infinite capabilities of humanity to transform consciousness. A Department of Peace can redirect our national energies towards... meditation."
Look, I'm for a left-leaning platform (universal health care, reforming the WTO, gay marriage) but the last time I tried to "tap infinite capabilities of humanity" I was sitting in a yurt at Doe Bay on Orcas Island.
Certainly, the board passed the Department of Peace resolution by the book. However, considering that the idea had been vetted at the grassroots legislative-district level (where--guess what?--it was promptly nuked and didn't even make it to the county convention), the last-minute board revision seems particularly dubious. More galling than the process, though, is the moronic DOP idea itself.
Not only will Washington Rs simply add water and stir to turn the asinine DOP into the best Republican attack ad of all time, but it's sfinancially irresponsible for Democrats to propose a new government agency while criticizing the Bush administration for running up a $521 billion deficit.
The first order of business when the Dems meet in Tacoma this week should be to bomb the Department of Peace and to stop letting Kucinich delegates embarrass the party.
Speaking of embarrassing, alarmists like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Robert Jameison, who editorialized about a pro-Israel conspiracy of "party honchos" and "Merlins" for selling out the party to "friends in high places" by nixing the anti-occupation plank, should note: The same board of "Merlins" simultaneously voted for a resolution condemning Israel's planned "Berlin Wall-style" West Bank fence. Moreover, the process that watered down the anti-occupation plank, while disheartening, was more legitimate than the DOP business. After all, the 50-plus-member board acted well within its powers by amending an existing plank. That's a far cry from voting in the Department of Peace resolution, which wasn't even discussed at the convention.