Click on Red State Son on my list o' links to read Dennis Perrin's piece "The GAW In Action," a thorough takedown of the mindless bullshit the media is spreading around in the wake of Gerald Ford's death. When I wrote my (rather superficial) bit on Ford yesterday, I somehow assumed a dissenting voice would be heard somewhere in all the coverage.
Why I thought that, I'll never know. I'd already plowed through the coverage at The New York Times--the paper that didn't think U.S. involvement in Pinochet's coup was worth mentioning in his obit--and was listening as I wrote to NPR's Morning Edition, a total Jerry Ford love fest.
Still, surely someone would--maybe, perhaps--offer at least the suggestion that Ford's pardon of Nixon was not a good thing. Someone would see Ford only got to be president because of repeated scummy behavior from the Nixon White House--first from Spiro Agnew, then from Dick himself--and so Ford's pardon could be seen as nothing more than a transparent sop to his benefactors. Someone, somehow, would offer an alternate version of the seventies, in which Nixon was impeached and prosecuted, and congress, under intense pressure from the American people, actually followed the evidence as far as it would lead, and all the transgressions and sins of the presidency would be laid bare, and oh, incidentally, a crook would be brought to justice.
No, no, none of that, just endless National-Nightmare-Is-Over replays and the phrase "healed the nation" used so many times you'd think Ford was Abraham, Martin and John combined.
Two other Jerry-related notes:
1) All the coverage of Ford's merge with the infinite was, shall we say, insubstantial, but the thing that finally pushed me over the edge was Alessandra Stanley's piece in The New York Times on TV coverage of his death. This might actually be the least interesting thing in the history of the world, an astonishing display of nothingness. Arts coverage in The Times has been in a tailspin for years, but Stanley and her fellow TV critic, Virginia Heffernan, are both young, uninformed about the medium they're assigned to cover, and display a total lack of curiosity about recent history. If anyone can find a single thing in Stanley's piece that justifies it seeing print, I'd like to hear about it.
2) Reliable hack Bob Woodward has come forward with an interview with Ford in which The Great Healer makes it clear he "strongly" opposed Bush's invasion of Iraq. The catch is, Ford told Woodward the interview could only be published after his death.
That's Ford in a nutshell--A man with strong convictions he never bothered sharing.
