Crashing the Ford

Have you had enough of the orgy of adoring Gerald Ford memorials yet? Ack. I feel like a kid on Halloween who just ate his entire bag of candy.

Don't get me wrong. I think Ford was an OK guy, a portrait of decency in both senses of that word, i.e., "where have all the decent men gone?", and "yeah, I guess, as a president, he was decent." And decency has been in short supply among more recent GOP administrations, for whom shit-sucking adequacy would be an improvement. What annoys me is how the MSM seems to have latched onto Ford at this particular moment as a nostalgia trip on the glory of "healing."

Not that healing is bad. Just that the vision of healing Ford symbolizes is a particularly dubious one in light of present circumstances. It's the "moderate" Republican as healer trope, combined with the conventional wisdom that Ford did the noble and selfless thing in pardoning Nixon and saving the nation from a long, bitter, drawn-out trial and its recriminations. In other words, it's the kind of healing that pretends there was no serious and gaping wound, no consuming cancer, no underlying crime that cried out for justice. "Yeah, Nixon was bad, but thankfully we had a moderate Republican on a white horse who rode in to save the day by sentencing Tricky to the author circuit."

As we now know, via Bob Woodward, Ford may not have done the "selfless" thing after all. Turns out he and Nixon had a sort of implied "deal" on pardons after all. Whatever his personal loyalties to Nixon, Ford may still have done the right thing. The existence of such an understanding between the men doesn't diminish the nation's need to heal and move on after Nixon's crimes. The business of governing went on, and Nixon was surely a distraction.

That said, sometimes you need to pay a price for doing the "right" thing. Human goods are often incommensuarble, and when Ford chose to pardon Nixon he also did something truly awful: he denied the American people justice for a criminal betrayal of their sacred trust and abridged the normal operations of the "rule of law." As a Nixon ally and a member of his political party, Ford was in no position to "forgive" Nixon, as Dick Cheney mendaciously claimed at Ford's funeral. The public reaction to Ford's pardon was absolutely correct. His support in the polls plummeted, and the pardon cost him the 1976 election. Damn straight. Should have been a landslide. Someone needed to pay a price for Nixon's criminality, and, by pardoning his buddy Nixon, Ford placed that burden on himself, knowing full well that his own punishment (losing an election to resume an office for which he had never been a serious contender anyway) was a faint shadow of that which Nixon himself would have faced.

There have been negative public consequences as well. Republicans have never had to fully grapple with the criminality at the heart of the "conservative" movement. They still agree with Tricky's famous apologia tyrannis that "if the president does it, it's not illegal." Scratch that: if a Republican president does it, it's not illegal. So the wound has not healed. We just accepted the superficial disappearance of outward symptoms of disease and agreed not to discuss the cancer in polite company. Nixon led to Bush. We got all the arrogance and illegality but without any of Nixon's policy moderation or twisted sense of guilt.

Surely it is no coincidence that the Ford love-fest coincides with Bush's fall from public grace. The MSM, complicit in Bush's treachery from the beginning, would like us all to forgive, forget, and move on. Let's just find a moderate Republican on a white horse to save the day, chant the Broders, the Gergens and the Brookses. You know. A McCain or a Lieberman.

Well, now's not the time to heal. Now's the time to punish. These bastards will never learn until they bleed. Metaphorically, that is. There will be a time for forgiveness. And there wil be men capable of offering that forgiveness. But that time is not now, and those men are not the "moderate" Republicans who abetted the original crimes. First we need some justice.