Passing of a President

I have held my keyboard tongue for a week and now I just have to blog about it.

Former President Gerald Ford died last week. A sad event, no doubt. He was a resident of our area and there was a service and he lay in the church up the street from our house to be recieved by the public for 24 hours. He was, by all accounts, a good man. And everyone has to appreciate that his position gave his wife, Betty Ford, the platform to bring drug abuse and, importantly, recovery to the fore for this nation like it never had before. For that alone we should all be grateful that he was president.

But what I kept hearing last week was that news agencies were having to search the archives for SOMETHING to say about his presidency and what they came up with was: the pardoning of Nixon.

Now, I had never really known what pardoning Nixon was or was not to have supposed to do until Ford's death last week. Afterall, I was a little kid during Watergate and the aftermath... even Chevy Chase's Ford impersonation was only caught by me in reruns of Saturday Night Live several years later. So, I was a little surprised when I heard Ford's explanation for pardoning Nixon was that 'the country would not have been able to focus on the President nor any other matter at hand if Nixon was being dragged from courtroom to courtroom'. OK. I get it.

Surprising though, was the UTTER lack of irony with which Republican and Republican-leaning newscasters and pundits explained this! No one dared reflect on the irony of Republicans prefering that one of their own - who'd been caught in the act - be pardoned so that 'the country could move on' when the instant the very next DEMOCRATIC President was elected into office, what did they do!? Impeach him!

Hypocracy seems to run rampant amongst the dogmatically Republican, neocon, conservative and religious right. All those people who shed tears of gratitude for what Ford saved the country from jumped right on the bandwagon, frothing at mouth, when a Republican Congress bullied the country into the very same, albeit unwarranted, mess! For nothing, to boot!

I wish someone last week had had the balls to at least say to the American people, "too bad the Republican Party didn't spare us the impeachment of an innocent President"... Well, I am saying it to the few Americans who read my blog, and perhaps a few foreigners among them.

And the more ironic, though I haven't actually heard anyone say it explicitly yet, is the notion that the current President Bush shouldn't be impeached for his lies and the many deaths they have caused simply to 'spare the nation' the pain it would cause to see the President impeached, and Oh the slow down of the workings of Congress. Why nothing would get done if Bush were to be impeached!

I suppose to be a Republican you have to believe that causing the country pain and bringing the goverment to a grinding halt is only worthwhile if it's not 'actual' pain but concocted out of malice.... Real pain, like admitting that our President has caused the loss of massive numbers of American and Iraqi lives, and changed lifes through disability and trauma beyond recognition, and also lost of Billions of dollars through mismanagement and fraud perpetrated by the Friends of the Administration and/or out of plain stupidity, which our children and their children will have to pay back, is just too... Oh, how you say? Painful? Oh, that damn reality. It's so harsh, isn't it?