PARDON ME, MR. FORD! AND HOW ABOUT YOU, TOO, MR. CHENEY?

Two Cents Worth

I've heard a lot of talk recently about how great a President Gerald Ford was.

I'm one of the antiquities who lived through those days, and I am delighted to agree that, by today's standards, he was a good and decent man. Much more decent than most presidents, although Carter was also a paradigm of gentility, but not an effective president. Compared to George W. Bush, Ford was a genius. Compared to George W. Bush, Ford was a saint.

(Further: Compared to Bush, Ford was a flaming liberal. All of the pussycat talk about the Ford years from some commentators these days doesn't include much discussion of policy. Truth is, Ford would NOT have fit into today's Republican Party at all. Much too liberal. Ford was more liberal than Hillary is now, and she was something of a hippie, once.) You can read about it HERE-- CLICK

But, he did pardon Mr. Nixon prematurely, and for me, that is a big deal. Nixon was a good friend of his. Ford was a prominent Nixon supporter, even until the end. "Joined at the hip," in current journalese. Ah, friendship! And the announcement was made early on a Sunday morning --- not in prime time, and not with the flourish of most Presidential pronouncements. And the pardon was "blanket." All the protestations of "national interest" and "national healing" are fine and wonderful, but we had endured a deceitful, corrupt Presidency --- a Constitutional struggle that was a lot more important than most citizens realized. Ford's sudden termination of the case against Nixon was not so much in the national interest as in the political interest of Ford and his party.

Without an accounting, the wounds left by Nixon have healed slowly and imperfectly -- and left a big scar. That is also Ford's legacy.

In this month's Harper's Magazine, Lewis Lapham, [ READ THE LAPHAM ARTICLE, CLICK HERE] a well known liberal and intellectual, and essayist the magazine, writes about the necessity of proceeding with impeachment against Bush. He argues that if we don't do it, democracy suffers; that exposing and condemning the anti-democratic behavior of our leaders is crucial for the preservation of the system. I have not been a believer in this particular impeachment effort, because I think the impeachment of Clinton was nothing but a cheap political attempt at a coup-d'etat, and we wouldn't want that sort of abuse by a legislative majority to become habit.

So, to my mind, Bush should not be impeached on the basis of the Democratic Party's win at the polls. If he is worthy of being booted out, such resolutions should have been introduced by the Democrats long ago. To my mind, it would be much better to do everything we can to discredit the dictatorial propensities of this petty-despot Bush and to undermine his oligarchic policies.

Still, maybe Lapham is right. If the country were to go forward with impeachment against Bush, he could always resign and Cheney could forgive him a-la Ford. And don't think they wouldn't cook that deal up. Ford-Nixon redux.
(B. Woods)