Ford

Please forgive me for not joining the parade of folks, including bloggers on our side who surely by now should know better, extolling Gerald Ford, especially for his "courage" in "ending the national nightmare of Watergate." There is a straight line between Nixon and his people getting away with only minimal damage to Iran-Contra to everything having to do with Bushnev's disasters. We needed an exorcism, needed to confront what was being done to our Constitution and our American Legacy, and Ford short-circuited it all with Nixon's pardon. Courage? Please. He almost won in '76 and, frankly, would have if he hadn't made bizarre claims about the Soviets being good neighbors to all the countries around it in his first debate with Carter.

And it's interesting how people have forgotten or never understood that he was J. Edgar Hoover's spy and waterboy on the Warren Commission, preventing it from examining the FBI's investigation or prior knowledge of Oswald or Ruby. The Commission never heard that Ruby was a bagman for the mob from his earliest days. Think that might have made a difference in the course of the investigation? Wonder who was one of the strongest proponents for a limited investigation?

Ford was not Bushnev or Reagan or Nixon. For that, he's getting undeserved plaudits for being the last "good" Republican. He wasn't. He made Cheney and Rumsfeld possible. He made everything we're living through right now possible. Go ahead and praise this devastator of what this country was supposed to be about. I'm sitting on my hands.