President Obama in Cuba

Posted on March 22, 2016 by Gordon C. Stewart

President Obama’s decision to visit to Cuba and his call to end the U.S. embargo bring me joy. It’s time to “normalize” relationships between our two countries.

But what does normalizing mean between the capitalist super power and tiny island socialist republic 90 miles from the Florida coast? A return to normal or a new kind of normal?

The President’s speech this morning is disappointing. I couldn’t help thinking of Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States when he poked the President in the eye in a speech aimed at the American people. This morning Barack Obama did the same in Havana.

The President says he knows the history. He may. But the history he knows is different from the one the Cubans know. When he talks about opening up Cuba, opening up Cuban markets so that Cubans can buy goods and have 21st century jobs, he ignores the reason for the Cuban revolution. The Batista regime was a U.S. puppet. Havana and Veradero Beach were playgrounds for North American capitalists, elites, and businessmen who gambled in the casinos and vacationed on the white sands few Cubans – except for the table-servers, maids, bartenders – ever got to touch.

Cuba was not a democracy under Batista and his predecessors. It was a dictatorship – AND its economy was free-market capitalism with egregious disparities of income and wealth. The majority of Cubans were as poor as the masses in other Latin American banana republics.

An article in The Independent provides the history of the challenges and successes of the post-revolution Cuban government’s literacy campaign and Cuba’s highly praised universal education system.

Will normalizing relations return Cuba to the pre-socialist inequalities that caused the revolution in 1959? Will it mean a return to “normal” – in which the superpower calls the shots while the little brother watches our president embarrass him from center stage?

Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, March 22, 2016

Can this be happening?

Posted on March 14, 2016 by Gordon C. Stewart

I scratch my head, wondering what to think, on the eve of another day of primaries. I am weary. Weary of the demagoguery of Donald Trump. Watching the tragedy unfold — fights at rallies, rallies called off, name-calling. “Kasich is a baby,” says Trump on the eve of the Ohio GOP primary, while people applaud the arrogance, the name-calling, the bravado, the nonsense: “We’re going to make America great again!”

We’re talking about the President of the United States of America.

A people’s frustration and anger do not a good president make. To the contrary, they make for division and demagoguery, for brawls in the streets, for the devolution of a nation to its lowest common denominator and the elevation of race, nation, and class as the altars of worship.

It leaves me speechless.

Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, March 14, 2016

Presidential humor and sanity

Video

A relaxed President Obama speaks about reality. Listen for Putin and the snowball! Some things you couldn’t make up!

Building Walls instead of Bridges

Posted on March 5, 2016 by Gordon C. Stewart

This post by John Buchanan’s “Hold to the Good” is well worth the read IMHO. John is Pastor Emeritus of Fourth Presbyterian Church-Chicago, past Moderator of the Presbyterian Church, and recently retired Publisher of The Christian Century.

Thank you, John, for your fine work than and now.

Gordon and Steve

Hold to the Good

I simply do not know what to say about Donald Trump. I grew up in a home where what was going on in the world and in the nation was talked about regularly at the dinner table. Politics was often a spirited discussion between my father, a dyed-in-the-wool Republican and conservative in almost all his opinions and positions, and my mother who I realized was a lot less ideological and more liberal. He didn’t have much good to say about President Roosevelt and Eleanor but she liked them a lot. Dad used to brag that the first words I spoke as a toddler were “Wendell Wilkie”, the Republican presidential candidate in the 1940 election, an election FDR won handily. I still have his Republican campaign lapel pin bearing Wilkie’s picture from that election. Robert Taft, Harold Stassen, Earl Warren, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Nelson Rockefeller, were familiar names to…

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“Making America ‘Great’ Again!”

Posted on February 27, 2016 by Gordon C. Stewart

Donald Trump’s refrain begs for interpretation. What does he mean by ‘great’? Is there a synonym for ‘great’ in Trump’s speech and demeanor?

“Make America the BULLY again!”

Mr. Trump – Mr. You’re Fired! – acts like a bully and talks like a bully. “We’re going to make America great again! You’re going to love it!”

Need we say more? Yes, we do. Because people are falling for it.

imposters-of-god Imagine the voice of William Stringfellow coming from the same stage as Mr. Trump:

“The sheer arrogance of the idolatrous claims of nations, perhaps especially those possessed of enormous economic and military strength, is so starling that the fascination of men (sic) with idolatry can be explained in no other conceivable manner than as moral insanity….

“More than one President of the United States, not to mention other lesser orators, have propounded, with sober face, the theme that America’s extraordinary power evidences an erstwhile holy dispensation and constitutes God’s partisanship for American dominance in the world.”- William Stringfellow, Imposters of God: Inquiries Into Favorite Idols, Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2006. [Imposters for God was original written as a confirmation curriculum for confirmands in the Episcopal Church in America.]

Gordon C. Stewart, Presbyterian minister, Chaska, MN, Feb. 27

A Sense of Decency

Posted on February 26, 2016 by Gordon C. Stewart

Pernicious Predatory Political Practices, published here this afternoon exposing a series of right-wing pernicious, predatory mailings preying on Senior Citizens, takes some of us back to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s tactics of fear and character assassination, and the famous line that stopped him in his tracks in 1944. Imagine the American people asking the same question to every political candidate this Super Tuesday:

“You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” – Joseph Welsh, Special Counsel for the Army

Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN 55318

Reader Comment:

“McCarthy, Wisconsin’s Jr. Senator didn’t respond. Trump & Cruz respond F. Y. Of course Rubio, the empty suit distinguished by ambition and absenteeism, was calculating his next slur on his ‘feckless’ President Obama. Had breakfast yesterday with retired Chair of History Department. His view is close to Ezra Klein’s Germany 1933. Scapegoating, authoritarianism, desperate and uneducated voters. Hitler won.” Jim

Pernicious Predatory Political Practices

Posted on February 26, 2016 by Gordon C. Stewart

An 85 year-old friend calls with a bit of panic in his voice. “I think I’ve gotten myself into something in Washington,” he said. He’s getting mailings that look he’s part of a lawsuit.

We meet for coffee to look over the mailings. He shows me the piece that worries him. It’s a law suit. It strikes him as very official. [See the return address in the top envelope below: Congressman Trey Goudy and my friend’s name v. President Barack Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and Homeland Security Secretary Johnson]. It has a case number: 584-9760 US.

Trey Goudy (R-SC) is Chair of the Congressional Committee on Benghazi, the one who was criticized by the next-in-line to be Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), because the committee was driven by a partisan political agenda. The letter speaks with urgency and asks for money to prosecute the case.

Next He pulls from his satchel a long tube from The National Campaign to Guarantee Social Security “warning” him of cuts to his Social Security benefits and possible elimination of Social Security. Only near the end of the three page letter does the campaign identify liberals as the enemies of Social Security. The letter solicits a sum of $200 before March 10 when the National Campaign to Guarantee Social Security’s creditors expect them to pay past bills.

Most of the mailings have the same return address: 1600 Diagonal Road, Suite 600, Alexandria, VA, the offices of the Federation of Responsible Citizens.

A search of the Federation of Responsible Citizens and other mail solicitors that target seniors led us to this podcast and article aired by Minnesota Pubic Radio in Dec., 2013.

http://www.mprnews.org/story/2013/01/03/news/mediscare-fundraising-mailers

My friend and I consulted with the MN Attorney General’s Office. We were told to tear up any such mailings. “Just throw them away. You’ll see this slow down or stop after the election.” But what about the millions of seniors who at one time made a small contribution to some such mailing, believing it was in their best interest to do so? Is there a lawsuit out there to stop this pernicious predatory political practice? Someone please say yes.

Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, Feb. 26, 2016

Term Limits: solution or problem?

Posted on February 25, 2016 by Gordon C. Stewart

Would setting limits to the number of terms a Congressperson can hold office help solve the problem in Washington, D.C.? Term limits is one proposed remedy for fixing Congress. Get rid of the career politicians! Fresh faces would be closer to the people they represent, set a new tone, and get things done.The idea has its appeal.

We’re tired of gridlock,but is putting fresh faces in the U.S. Congress – or the White House – all it’s cracked to be?

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Senator Tom Cotton (R-AK) rode into the Senate on a high horse, penned a letter to the government of Iran opposing the Obama Administration’s diplomatic efforts with Iran, and secured the signatures of 46 of the 53 Republican Senatorial colleagues. In March 2015 the newly elected Senator appeared on Face the Nation to make his case for Iran’s creeping influence in the Middle East, declaring,

“They [the Iranians] already control Tehran.”

Did he say “Tehran” – the capitol of Iran, the Tehran of the Persian Empire dating back 5,000 years?

Yes, he did. Either the Senator came to the Senate clueless about geography, history, the sensitivities of a tense geopolitical world, and the traditions of how foreign policy is conducted in the United States, or, worse, he just doesn’t care. Neither is acceptable for a member of the United States Senate. The Senate is the body with the longer terms (six years compared to 2 for the House of Representatives) because of the Founders’ wisdom. Those who wrote the Constitution knew the value of continuity, as well as change.

In the much more complex world of the 21st Century, the case for longevity, not term limits, is an argument for wisdom.

Citizens who have served as city councilors, state legislators, or board members of local organizations, colleges and universities know how long it takes to get up to speed. Those who are most effective learn to keep their mouths shut while learning how to drive a vehicle they’ve never driven before in the company of more experienced drivers who know the rules of the road.

The advantage of long-standing service in the U.S. Congress or of a Presidential candidate with longer experience and long-term memory is that they’ve been around long enough to know the history, however differently they interpret it on different sides of the political aisle.

And then…there’s Donald Trump who has NO experience in elected office. If you need a nudge to think about it, remember the ambitious Senator Cotton on Face the Nation.

Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, Feb. 25, 2016

The Pope and Toxic Religion

Posted on February 19, 2016 by Gordon C. Stewart

Two independent but related stories on religion appeared within hours of each other.

popeatborder “Pope says Trump border stance is not Christian,” reads the lead headline of this morning’s StarTribune. The AP story focuses on statements by the Pope and Mr. Trump. “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be,” said the Pope, “and not building bridges, is not Christian.” Donald Trump replied, “For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful. I’m proud to be a Christian.”

This afternoon Presbyterian ministers in the Twin Cities Area received this announcement about a conference called “Recovery from Religion“:

Recovery from Religion

“The conference, sponsored by MICAH and the Minnesota Institute of Contemplation and Healing, will address toxic theology, post-traumatic stress disorder and the road to healing. The conference is designed for healthcare professionals, clergy and anyone whose life has been touched by a negative religious message.”

The cartoon text reads as follows: “And then, boys and girls, our loving Father throws all those unbelievers into the fires of Hell where they’re unbearably tortured for ever and ever. Now who’s ready for a snack?”

Lord, save us from toxic religion! Put me in the Pope’s column!

Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, Feb. 19, 2016.

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