Richard Detrich’s Boquete, Panama Weblog

Every day at sea we get copies of THE NEW YORK TIMES’ “Times Digest.”

Many years ago, when I was a hot, firebrand young minister in the late 60’s serving an all-Black church in the South Bronx, I was invited to preach in a number of churches in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I had lived for a while and gone to college. In an Obama-like moment during a sermon in one church I called then President Richard Nixon a “crook”. Several people were so incensed they walked out and I was the talk of after-church gossip in Russ’ (a Western Michigan hamburger institution where the number one topic seems to be church gossip). I believe the church where I spoke has since been closed, and of course we now know Nixon was a crook.

On the same speaking tour I also had a Hillaryesque moment (Hillary who noted she didn’t stay in the kitchen and make cookies) when I also noted as an aside in a sermon, “Any fool can bake a cake.” They never let me forget that comment, especially when I returned to that same church to get married and the ladies of the congregation celebrated by baking the cakes . . . and reminding me that I had once said . . .

In Panama we choose not to have satellite TV and I get my news on line. So, while I am on the ship I enjoy a steady diet of CNN. So I have been following all the candidates gaffes, amazed that they don’t make more, and amazed at how CNN can devote hours to the most inane comments while ignoring the enormous issues.

As the Nixon tapes emerged we all noted how cleverly and callously he had manipulated the evangelical church and church leaders, including my mentor Norman Vincent Peale, to achieve his personal political aggrandizement. That’s why it so amazed me to see evangelicals and conservative church leaders be suckered in by George W. Bush and follow blindly the emperor who we all now know had no clothes. Not only has “W” blatantly lied to the American people, initiated and endorsed torture, plunged the country into deep indebtedness and economic chaos while squandering away America’s prestige in the world, he has chipped away at the rights Americans have enjoyed since our nation was founded, rights which will never be recovered.

So the closing paragraph in a TIMES’ editorial “The Torture Sessions” seemed to express not only the lament of the past eight years, but the importance of the coming election:

Only by fully understanding what Bush has done over eight years to distort the rule of law and violate civil liberties and human rights can Americans ever hope to repair the damage and ensure it does not happen again.