PRESIDENT FORD

I'm sure that pretty much anybody who follows the news knows that our longest living President, Gerald Ford, finally died a day or two ago. As with Nixon and Reagan, the TV news organizations have gone out of their way to lionize the old fellow, running clip after clip, playing up especially his pardoning of his predecessor as an extremely good thing.

Atrios over at Eschaton is all over it:

As we all know, because everybody on the teevee will keep repeating it, Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon was perhaps the wisest and awesomest thing anyone has ever done in the history of presidenting. Never mind that it wasn't popular at the time. Never mind that it set an awful precedent which led to the pardoning of the Iran Contra figures and transformed corrupt Nixonites into distinguished elder statesmen and Bush administration officials.

Click here for the rest.

And again from Eschaton:

The important thing was to find out the truth. Our elites repeatedly redefine "getting past it" as "sweeping it under the rug" based on their apparent opinion of themselves as necessary moral and spiritual leaders for the riffraff.

Click here for more.

The reason it was important to find out the truth is because Watergate was only the tip of the iceberg. Actually, all Watergate was is the screw-up that let everybody at the time know just how powerful and corrupt the Nixon White House had become. As Noam Chomsky has observed numerous times, Watergate was almost nothing compared to Nixon's real crimes: the impeachment proceedings were allowed to continue because Tricky Dick had amassed so much power in so much secrecy that the powerful and wealthy elites, the ones our leaders actually represent, got nervous.

Here is a CounterPunch essay going into further detail on that issue.

So Ford really screwed up, destroying any real chances this country had for "healing" after Nixon resigned. Indeed, America's failure to deal decisively with the fallout from Watergate allowed pretty much the same system Nixon played to remain intact, which, obviously, set the stage for the gross abuses of the current White House. I'm not saying that Ford had some sort of deal with Nixon, as many alleged at the time of the pardon. But I am saying that old Gerry gets a cut of the blame for the sad and sorry state the nation is in today.

On the other hand, I've always liked Ford. He really was a "regular guy" President, shunning the anti-democratic Presidential mystique fostered by every President, including Carter, since then. And you've just gotta love the Chevy Chase stuff on SNL. And Ford wasn't really all that conservative by today's standards--of course, given the extremism that passes as conservatism today, a strong majority of old school Republicans would probably rate as closer to moderate.

How I miss the 70s!

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