Gerald Ford, our 38th President, has passed away. I do not know the cause of death. May he rest in peace.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Ford was 93 years old. The initial take is to focus on his courage in pardoning Nixon. That is going to be hard to swallow over the coming days. I think Ford was a very decent man. I’d like to focus on that.
Ford was a man who did not ask to be put into the position of president. He did what he thought was right. He knew that pardoning Nixon meant the end of his slim chances to win the Presidency on his own, but he did it anyway. Take a look at his life, and, unless his pardon of Nixon outweighs everything in your mind, his life will stand up close scrutiny. Not too many people who served in DC as long as he did can say that.
I’ll have a lot to say about Ford’s era in the coming days. I like to write about it anyway. There is a lot to criticize. But Ford was a basically decent man. He was often wrong on important issues. But he was someone that I think we can be, on the whole, proud of. I think he made a mistake in pardoning Nixon. But I think he life was much larger than that one choice. Tomorrow I will probably be magnanimous out of respect, but thereafter I will talk more about his brief Presidency.
He was a pathetic man. Let him go. We’ve got more important issues ahead of us.
He set the precedent for one of Bush’s escape hatches now.
We should have had Nixon put on trial.
I’m sure that compared to what we have now, Ford was an okay guy.
But Kissinger was still at State until Cheney and Rummy got rid of him.
And Rockefeller, the scourge of Attica, was Veep.
To be fair, I can’t really blame Ford for not having the nerve to trigger the constitutional crisis that trying Nixon would have produced. And I’m not sure that such a trial would have been a good thing.
That said, I think the pardon was a mistake and that Nixon should have faced charges. Why? We can’t know what would have happened with a trial, but Dubya is the final outcome of the pardon, and it’s hard to imagine things turning out worse.
On the other hand, this was during the Cold War, when the country faced much, much bigger threats than an overhyped group of thugs and bandits like al Qaeda — like Leonid Brezhnev and 20,000 Soviet warheads. It’s easy to forget that we spent sixty years under the threat of extinction at half an hour’s notice.
Ergo, despite my feelings about what should have been done, I am reluctant to pass judgment on Ford. None of the choices open to him were good.
which is why Ford wasn’t reelected.
Nixon in court would have opened up not only his sins, but the sins of all of those who did his bidding. Even foreign policy would have been opened up to scrutiny.
All those congressional investigations that occurred afterwards were extensions of that inquiry that never happened. They were not given context and weight, since the criminal had absconded already.
And we are paying for it now.
Feel free and focus on that Booman.
The rest of us will deal with reality.
tell us what reality is wilfred.
How weird to hear comments on a blog that calls itself Progressive when it sounds like Red State.
Gerald Ford robbed this country of the opportunity to see justice done. The horseshit argument that Ford did this to heal the country is spin we now refer to as Rovian. Ford did this as quid pro quo to protect a crook who annointed him as VP, as he was never elected President or Vice-President by the people.
To see Nixon pardoned as good for the people is to say that Ken Lay needed no further punishment other than to leave Enron.
This was a slap in the face to all who became politically active in the 60’s thinking we could make a difference only to see JFK, RFK and MLK murdered before our very eyes only to then have to watch crooks like Nixon follow them and then get coddled when caught doing their supremely dirty deeds like Watergate and the bombing of Cambodia and Laos. It paved the way for Ollie North, Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Iran Contra a decade later.
We fought for transparency in government and are given a corrupt old boys club who protect each other when their allegience should be to the voters and the Constitution. It’s still in operation today as the Libby mess will bear out where Cheney and Bush are concerned.
I agree with much of what you say, but Gerald Ford wasn’t a part of the extreme right that Bush represents. I don’t think Ford’s pardon was a quid pro quo arrangement with Nixon. Maybe I don’t want to, I don’t know. But thirty-five years is a long time, and Nixon was so destructive, I hate to see him rising from grave to incite passion again. He’s not worth it.
he’s morphed into Jr. Bush and his junta.
HE’s essentially gotten what he wanted now that couldn’t be done in the Seventies.
The same Nixon-Reagan discredited gang is in office.
I still associate him with Operation Condor. I would not mind to see him join Pinochet in hell.
The “WIN” buttons
The honest wife.
The daughter that majored in Art History.
Is he doin’ the James Brown?
LOL, well Gerald never beat his wife anyway 🙂
Betty Ford was a great First Lady and wife.
She raised her kids right.
Is he doin’ the James Brown?
He may be dancing the Bad Luck, and stumbling, too.
for some time…personally, I have more respect for Betty than Gerry; I hope that her response to his pardoning Nixon was a good “WTF were you THINKING????”
Served as President though never elected by the people to the Presidency or Vice-Presidency…and we could have a similar scenario in the next couple of years…
His Presidency is a tribute to the resiliency of our system of government. No one argued or fought over who should replace Nixon and Agnew. He did not steal an election like Bush.
Here’s some info on his career.
link.
of watching escape from Saigon.
and being the last rethug VP who wasn’t entirely evil.
from the more conservative forces for being pro-choice, according to some reports. Perhaps if he’d been re-elected, the moderates would have retained control of the Republican party and the rise of the Religious Reich would have been restricted. We’ll never know…
bullshit.
He was one of their enablers. He was the bought-off judge & jury who gave Nixon and thus his cabal a get-out-of-jail-free card. He pardoned a man who precipitated a constitutional crisis for political convenience, because real hearings or a trial would have brought out how utterly out of control our government was. From this pile of smelly fertilizer the October Surprise grew, our fostering of death squads in South America and then Iran-Contra grew, and from THOSE unpunished and under-investigated series of crimes the seeds for OUR CURRENT CRISIS GREW.
He was a shill, a functionary, a bag carrier for the far-right elements of the Republican party.
God, several days of more lies and enforced piety like we had to put up with when that fucker Reagan died.
WHERE IS THE CONSTANT LECTURING ABOUT ACCOUNTABILITY AND THE RULE OF LAW WHEN ONE OF THESE ASSHOLES COMMITS A CRIME, OR ENABLES A CRIME?
The poor have been increasingly “held accountable” for events not even within their control, like bankruptcies resulting from illness and job loss … now they have no way out.
Our prisons are FULL of people being “held accountable” for YEARS for even small amounts of drugs.
Woman face increasingly draconian policies so that they can be “held accountable” for being sexual beings.
Gays are “held accountable” by being denied equal protection under the law for pissing off the Great Hairy Thunderer in the Sky.
EVERYBODY is held accountable except the rich, the connected and the rightwing, and yet once again we’re lectured about how they are “good men” and “well meaning” and we should show “respect” for them, no matter the damage they do.
Bullshit. If I have to listen to an repeated recitation of the assorted crimes and misdeeds of fucking James Brown (and to get a full picture of his life, that IS part of the story), then we should ALSO get to hear about the reasons and the damage done by Ford’s politically motivated pardon of that criminal Nixon. IT WASN’T THE BRAVE ACT OF A STATEMAN, it was the action of either a political coward or a venal bagman. I vote for the later.
you said it far far better than i did. Bravo.
And as HuffPo points out this morning the news coverage has consistently ommitted any mention of Ford telling NYC to “Drop Dead” after white flight by coroporations and wannabe suburbanites crippled our greatest city in the 60’s.
I never have to guess how you might feel about something.
it’s both a blessing & a curse.
RIP, President Ford. I’m not going to jump on the bandwagon that others have here and criticize him, as, like Booman said above, I do think he was a largely decent person. Given the Republicans of this day and age, he deserves some respect.
And whoever said accused BMT of being equivalent to RedState because of this? Grow up.
Grow up? Please kiddo have some respect (like that will happen!) for those of us who fought in the streets to stop Vietnam and who screamed as loud about that crook Nixon as we have about Bush because they were both extremely horrible for the country. I was there boychick, you weren’t so don’t lecture me on what it was like to live through that era and then be told how great Ford was on a “Progressive” blog. When you and Red State are singing the same tune about a Republican who royally fucked the citizens of this country who are you to tell me to grow up? Spare me the DNC wannabe b.s.
without thinking of Chevy Chase. The stumbles and pratfalls made his career. Both of ’em. Ford’s wife was an alcoholic but he’s the one who acted like he was sloshed as he sleep-walked thru the Presidency. Ford was comic relief at the time: Instead of overt evil, we got banal evil.
I have no doubt we’ll hear the word “courage” connected to this soulless man’s name over the next couple of days so I’m prepared to stifle my gag reflex.
And in a further development, General Francisco Franco is still dead…
Thanks for the reminder – at least we had some laughs then, not this painful horror. I hated the man for what he did. But now I know that it takes some kind of courage to sustain a marriage to an addict. I’ll remember him as a repub who knew how to keep a pledge. Who knows what was between him and Nixon?
Where’ve you been, girl?
Lurkin’. Can’t think of anything entertaining to say lately.
Like with John McCain in South Carolina, the mighty Republican Wurlitzer (actually in those days a small Yamaha keyboard) tested its propaganda on a Republican first. The constant news clips of Ford falling, the snickering over the “whip inflation now”–check them out and see if they weren’t from some of the same “reporters” that move the propaganda forward today.
For the proto-wingnuts, Ford had to lose in 1976 so that Saint Ronny could run and win in 1980. A Ford win might have taken him to 1984 and wingnuts’ worst nightmare — a Democratic President in the then-feared Orwellian year. And an elected Ford presidency would have strengthened a Democratic Congress.
The test run of the propaganda machine worked. The rest is history–from the “killer rabbit” to “Whitewater” and “Vince Foster” to “Gore invented the internet”, it had its roots in the war against the war against inflation.
Ford rescued the Republican Party at a time when they had been discredited. Ford got Watergate out of the news headlines by pardoning Nixon. Decency and party loyalty thus were used to further the wingnut cause.
Our “great national nightmare” might have been over but the monster was still loose in the countryside.
ah, a voice of sanity. Thanks for calling it like it was and sadly still is.
HST –
Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon.”
How nice to hear Hunter Thompson on a day like today when I am subjected to a closeted Anderson Cooper interviewing Alexander Haig about Ford and those ‘glory days’ of theirs in the Nixon/Ford era.
You just did something that I had previously thought impossible – Made me grateful, for just a second, that I’m stuck at work in my cubicle, unable to do my brain any harm by watching the televised fellatio of the Nixon/Ford era.
Good strategy. I know myself too well. I’m too weak to resist and I don’t have a six year old to force sober thinking on me. By the way, if anybody wants to read something misinformed, misguided, not to mention completly fucking insane about the Nixon pardon, have a look here.
I’m listening to the Subdudes and cleaning up the house. Gerald who? 🙂
I am a total LOSER today. I should write a big fat L on my forehead with eye liner and be forced to wear it all day. I’m still in my jammies, Josh is running around in his drawers, we are pigging out on mini KitKats that I had hidden in the pantry but was caught…..and Josh told me I was a pig. We have no goals in life.
Goals Schmoals.
I have a work project I am totally procrastinating about today. And I am counting the days until January 8th…
and disgust on here today in light of where we find ourselves with our current President and half of the Nixon administration up on the hill with him. I was in fourth grade when Nixon left office. I lived with my grandparents then due to my age and my father not being a very efficient single parent. My grandmother was a raging Democrat so everything news was watched and gleaned. What I remember of Gerald Ford then from my childish perspective was a soft spoken man who gave me the feeling he desired more than anything to be decent and had very little idea what to do about or with Nixon.
Media fronting.
He sure listened to Alexander ‘Seven Days in May’ Haig and those three options about what to do with Nixon.
Watergate happened during my ages 19-21. Principled guys were needed during that time, not just decent guys.
…what “kind of man” Ford was? He was who he was, he did what he did, and the consequences his actions were whatever they were. Then the guy grew old, got sick and died. Just like everybody else.
If there was and real indication that those who can afford to buy their way into power in this system had any inclination to learn from our own history, I’d say there was some use in rehashing this guys life and times, but damned if I see any genuine evidence of that.
So my TV will remain off because I am just plain sick of the media marketing of ordinary events in the lives of the “rich and famous” being publicized as if these people were some kind of god like beings we ought to all stand in awe of. I don’t want to listen to days and days of details of some dead guys life, or see the “pomp and circumstance” with which he’ll be planted and I will NOT watch any of it.
I just want to turn on my effin TV, and hear what the HELL is really going on inside our present government, and in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East and in Somalia and Darfur and along our own borders and in New Orleans and in our new detention camps here at home where we are now finger printing babies, fer keerists own sake!
But no. It’s an old dead President we’re going to focus on now, and (I see) fight over with each other here on the blogs. Shit.
I bet BushCo is secretly happy as hell Ford chose this particular time to croak, thus keeping everybody nice and distracted even longer, or at each others throats, so we don’t notice whats really going on.
Whatever the next highest level of total absolute disgust is,I am soooo THERE!
NEWS STRIKE!
(OMG, now I am channeling AG!! )
since the corporate owned media and the Republicans will be doing major Party rehabilitation PR for the next week over Ford’s death our job as Opposition is to point out the truth beneath the bullshit instead of joining the Felatio-a-thon.