Wednesday, December 27, 2006

From the Boy King's remarks on Gerald Ford:
For a nation that needed healing, and for an office that needed a calm and steady hand, Gerald Ford came along when we need him most.
I'm not sure what people mean about Ford 'healing' the nation after Watergate, and I suspect they don't know themselves. I think it probably means something like 'he was there while two years passed and people started to forget'. He was amiable (unlike Nixon) and reasonably honest (unlike Nixon) and he didn't make things much worse. Given a couple of the presidents we've had since, that now seems like a tremendous accomplishment.

Our own long national nightmare is far from over. At the end of it we will still have a nation where a significant minority are contemptuous of the Constitution, support torture, and embrace the notion of a supreme executive unchecked by what were once other branches of government. The wounds are far worse than those of Watergate, and we will need someone a whole lot better than Ford to heal them.

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