Speech by Dr. Stephen Taylor at the Rockwall County Convention
 Saturday March 29, 2008

My fellow democrats,

Welcome to the Rockwall County Democratic Convention. Each of us has come here for a several reasons. Our most immediate reason is to represent the candidate of our choice. This campaign for the presidency has gone on for over a year and still has months to go. But we have each decided to stand for either Hillary Clinton or Barrack Obama. And we hope that today our candidate will prevail. We have listened to their debates, their interviews, the pronouncements of the pundits, and most recently the propaganda from each campaign coordinator. This is as it should be, that is our democratic process. May the best man or woman win the majority of delegates today.

But I want to remind you that we are all first and foremost Democrats. We Democrats have a proud history of standing up for the working man, for the poor, for the disenfranchised among us. Our party is inclusive of every gender, race, creed, color, sexual preference, age group and the disabled. We believe government should serve the needs of its citizens, and by that we mean ALL OF IT'S CITIZENS! We believe that working people deserve access to health care and that people with a life threatening disease should not have to go bankrupt paying their astronomical medical bills. We believe workers should be paid a living wage and should be protected against harm while engaging in their work. We believe that education is for the majority and not just for those who can afford expensive schools. We believe that mega corporations are not good for this country because they lie, cheat and pollute. They also hire expensive lawyers to circumvent the laws of our country and get around paying their fair share of taxes. They ship our good paying jobs to foreign countries where they run unbelievably cruel sweat shops, use child labor, don’t have to obey environmental or labor laws. They sell us toys for our kids filled with toxins. And who knows what else is in the millions of products that we import from these countries? The resulting massive imports we consume have savaged the value of the dollar like no recent time in American history.

As Democrats we also believe in the regulation of business and industry. The Republicans sold us on the idea that any regulation is bad for business but as usual they lied. Healthy businesses stay in business. As the Bush-Cheney administration has systematically crippled each of our regulatory agencies they have allowed the corresponding industry to run amok. The FCC has allowed giant corporations to accumulate the power to control the information we receive over the airwaves and in print media resulting in the squelching of debate in our country; they have tried to kill public broadcasting and taken to unnecessary censoring of our media. The FAA has sat on its hands instead of making sure our air travel is safe, timely and well organized. NASA has pushed to get the broken down shuttle system into space despite extreme risk to astronauts and the Bush lackeys there have done everything in their power to militarize space and squelch the principles of science. The Treasury and the Fed have conspired to turn lose the predatory dogs of Wall Street on the unsuspecting public. And WE are now suffering the financial consequences. Guess who will end up paying the bill for their lying, cheating and manipulation of the markets? We the tax payers will that’s who. And this list is a miniscule sample of the malfeasance of this administration. They have also perverted the purpose of the American judicial system by putting bigots and right wing zealots on the Supreme Court, by using the federal attorneys for political hatchet jobs on Democrats and by ignoring the enforcement of civil rights and liberties. They have used semantics to obscure their obvious use of torture in interrogating detainees who often turn out to be innocent. They have used legal principles made up as they go along to falsely detain torture and try them without habeus corpus. They have spied on us in our daily lives like a real version of the book 1984.

And least you think I forgot there is the war. This stupid, ghastly, thoughtless, disorganized war that is going to end up costing us between 2 and 3 trillion dollars. That is enough money to save Social Security until 2070 or to rebuild every hospital in the United States or to rebuild every school twice over. Now we have passed the horrific milestone of 4000 soldiers dead, of 40,000 wounded and maimed, of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives snuffed out and yet no end is in sight. They lied us into this war with the help of a lap dog mainstream media. They concocted the intelligence and then blamed their own faulty intelligence on our CIA. They sent Paul Bremer in and instantly 4-5 billion dollars in cash became unaccounted for. Then he proceeded to allow the looting and criminalization of the entire country. From there his main goal seemed to be to set up crooked businesses for Bush and Cheney’s cronies while the Iraq continued to slide down the drain. Then we had Rumsfeld running the war. He will no doubt go down in history as an arrogant and ignorant buffoon. But not before he got us entrenched in a quagmire that makes Vietnam look like a brief conflict. As democrats we know that it is time to get our soldiers, airman, navy and marines out of harms way and allow the Iraqis to determine their own future. It is time for our country to heal the damage done to our reputation and to our society by this mindless and endless war. Isn’t it time that we return to the peace and prosperity we had before these war profiteers stole the office of the presidency in 2000? Isn’t it time we had accountable government again, a government that defends our rights and liberties instead of systematically ridding us of them? Isn’t it time that greedy corporate CEO’s and executives go to jail for their crimes? Don’t you think it is time for Democrats to take over this country?
So I ask you today, which is more important, your loyalty to your candidate or your loyalty to this great country of ours? We are here today because we believe in the need for change and EITHER OF OUR CANDIDATES can accomplish that change. But they can only accomplish it with the help of ALL of us. So after our election today I hope you will leave here not as a Clinton or Obama Democrat but as a Democrat period. Let’s join together after today to save our country, it needs a united Democratic Party.

Thank you.

Dr. Stephen Taylor,
Rockwall County Democratic Chair
March 29, 2008