Gerald Ford, the Nation's (Quack) Healer
The
evil that men do lives after them, The good is oft interr d with their
bones
When I first read that quote
from Shakespeare it seemed wrong to me. When people die it seems that the evil
they do is interr'd, and we try our best to find the good. Perhaps Shakespeare
was taking the long view. Once someone's been dead for a decent period of time,
we disinter the evil that we
overlooked.
The media coverage of
Gerald Ford's death brings this to mind. Don't get me wrong. Ford was not an
evil man. He was an uninspired and uninspiring hack politician who became
President solely by accident, though we all knew, when he was confirmed as vice
president, that he would indeed become President. He was acceptable as a
potential caretaker president to the Democrats that controlled Congress at the
time.
What brings the quote to mind,
and my doubts about its truthfulness, is the determined efforts of the media to
make a virtue out of one of Ford's truly bad actions-the Nixon pardon. We are
supposed to believe that Ford "healed" the nation after ascending to the office
in the wake of Nixon's resignation. How this healing was accomplished is
unclear, other than the fact that after Nixon, he was not-Nixon. Anyone could
have done that.
I was there, and I
don't recall feeling healed. Medically, it's my understanding that one should
clean a wound before stitching it up, else one risks infection. There was no
cleaning after Nixon's resignation. For all its faults, the system of justice,
had it worked its course, would have healed the nation much better than Ford
ever could or did. Nixon would have and should have been convicted of a crime.
The infection he left behind incubated, burst out briefly during the Reagan
years, and is now a full fledged plague.
Ford set a precedent-that the
consequence of presidential criminality is a brief period of ostracism followed
by a rehabilitation of sorts. Hardly the type of consequence conservatives
normally tout as an effective crime deterrent. Small wonder that Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Bush, et. al, feel no pressure to conform to constitutional niceties.
The upside is too attractive; the downside means nothing to this bunch of
psychopaths.
Apart from the pardon,
Ford was a non-entity. There are worse types of presidents for sure. He had the
virtue, at least, of being aware on some level, of his own mediocrity, and
neither claimed greatness, aspired to cult status, nor claimed to talk to God.
It's hard to believe that those virtues now make him look at least not-so-bad.
I'd trade what we have for him, but that's not saying much.
Posted: Thursday - December 28, 2006 at 08:54 PM