Let’s Get Real About Gerald Ford

12/29/2006

Gerald Ford training his pit bull pups, Rumsfeld and Cheney

OK, I do understand the proper protocol when a famous person croaks. Everybody is on their best behavior and everything they say about the croakee is in praise. That’s a grand old tradition and it’s precisely what’s been happening during the last few days since former president Gerald Ford ascended into the Great White House in the Sky. The party line is: He was a courageous leader who healed the nation in a time of need, a decent man without pretensions from whom the current batch of political whores could learn a few lessons.

Disagree.

Let’s get real. Of course Gerald seemed like a decent man. Look at the president he was always compared to: Richard Nixon, the guy Gerald replaced when Tricky Dick had to vacate the presidency in 1974 one step ahead of the lynch mob. Nixon was a paranoid, vindictive, lying snake who richly deserved to be dismembered and have his rancid body parts spread across the country as a lesson to all American politicians current and future: If you betray the public trust, you will go down. You’ll be publicly disgraced, forcibly removed from office, then led away in shackles to jail where you’ll rot until the Grim Reaper leads you off to an even more fitting place.

That’s what Dick deserved, but what he got instead was a full and complete pardon from President Gerald Ford. Gerald always defended the pardon as the only way for the country to put Watergate behind it once and for all. For you youngsters (or oldsters with bad memories), Watergate was a series of crimes and cover-ups that Dick and his pals concocted to subvert the constitution, screw their political enemies and strengthen their hold on power. (Sound familiar?) The whole sad set of events was symptomatic of the Nixon administration mentality that they could do whatever the hell they wanted and no one, NO ONE, could do a God damn thing about it. Like most such attempts, in politics and in business, it eventually collapsed under its own weight. Turncoats talked, deep throats snitched and dozens went to prison.

But not Dick. He went back to California and spent the rest of his life trying to salvage his reputation. At his own funeral in 1994, politicians of every stripe waxed poetic about the man’s greatness. Bob Dole cried. Tricky Dick became Saint Richard.

It wasn’t just Watergate that was threatening to ruin our country back in those frightening days. Vietnam was dying a depressing death after 10 years and 58,000 American fatalities. Ford and Nixon didn’t start that war, of course, but they entrusted the running of it to Henry Kissinger, the Mad Bomber of Cambodia, who secretly expanded the war and finally ended it with the same deal we could have had back in 1969, six years and 20,000 American deaths later.

Those were lessons that couldn’t have escaped two guys who lived through those events at Gerald’s side, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Have a look at the picture above. There’s Don, Gerald’s Chief of Staff and later Defense Secretary, looking almost exactly like he does today, cocky and devious. But who’s the guy on the right with the smile and the hair? It’s none other than our current Vice President, Big Dick Cheney, who was Don’s Deputy and later Chief of Staff after Don went to Defense. The smile and the hair are gone, but the Big Dick remains.

Evidently, the lesson they learned was that you actually can run the country like your personal fiefdom and still beat the rap. Rumsfeld , Cheney and their neocon friends sat down and made up the justification for the Iraq war, then carried it out by accusing anyone who disagreed with them of being part of the Hate America First club. They rewarded their friends with no-bid contracts and arrogantly disregarded the advice of their own military and the rest of the world.

Want more Nixon-like arrogance? How about illegal wiretapping of American citizens and illegal treatment of detainees at Guantanamo? But if you bring that up, I’d have to accuse you of being a traitor to the cause when our patriotic president and his administration are fighting the war on terror over there so we all don’t have to fight it here. There’s a war going on, you know.

So, that’s Gerald Ford’s legacy. Pure evil in the form of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld and Big Dick Cheney. Gerald was a decent man with impeccable integrity. He was certainly a step above the band of chimpanzees and criminals we have now. But he had a chance to change the course of history for the better and he blew it with the pardon. And now we’re living Watergate and Vietnam all over again.

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