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February 1, 2008 - January 25, 2008

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

THE WORD ON THE FUTURE. Here at InstaPunk, we hope you all had a wonderful Christmas season and a joyfully optimistic celebration of the arrival of another new year. We'll be back soon with a series of brief and wildly discrepant entries on our varied thoughts about the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007. We seem to have acquired some new contributors along the way, so look forward to even more craziness than we've mustered in the past.

Keep checking in. You won't have a long wait.

FUNERALS. Let no one mistake me on this point. I never had the least doubt that Gerald R. Ford was a good man. I was moved by the Episcopal service at the National Cathedral, as well as the eulogies and the gorgeous music, including the Navy Hymn and Denyce Graves's extraordinary rendition of The Lord's prayer. President Ford deserved the public contrition he received regarding the Nixon pardon, and it was fitting that Nancy Reagan should be there, and Jimmy Carter, and Rosalynn, and Bob Woodward, and others who benefitted, directly or indirectly, from Ford's preference for statesmanship over politics. The press coverage was decent, the occasion suitably solemn, and the public response gratifying.

It's just that I was struck by all that was left unsaid, particularly about the ironic coincidence of a lavish Ford commemoration at this precise moment in time.

Why ironic? All the eulogies focused on Ford's brief presidency, largely ignoring the fact that he served as House Minority Leader for many years when the Republican Party was not just a minority in the U.S. Congress, but a woefully impotent minority almost invariably crushed by the ruthless, veto-proof majority enjoyed by the Great Society Democrats of Lyndon Johnson. In this context, Ford's renowned affability was a political necessity, an accident of history that perpetuated his career during the "long national nightmare" of post-FDR Democratic dominance in American politics. Nixon had momentarily threatened Democratic domination: LBJ knowingly fought a war he never believed he could win and spent the nation into a state of unprecedented deficits and inflation. Destroyed by his own failure, Johnson refused to run for the second term he was entitled to seek. In response, the Democrat Party imploded, nominating for the presidency first the vice-president who was obviously complicit in the twofold Vietnam/fiscal disaster and then an absurd candidate who ran on the notion that a world continuously threatened by Soviet domination would be better off with an American government committed to pacifism at all costs. McGovern was rejected by a landslide. Nixon was offered a renewed opportunity to run a gridlocked government capable of acting almost unilaterally in foreign policy matters while restricted to policy-making by veto on domestic matters.

Then Nixon was brought down by a combination of his own paranoia and mass media vindictiveness. (I'm not going to argue the case for media bias except to note that the press could have -- at virtually any time -- finished off JFK for sex and drug offenses and LBJ for manifold, blatant acts of financial and political corruption; they simply chose not to.)

Gerald Ford, the man compelled by his own life's history to become an expert at playing a losing hand, fell into the role of designated sacrifical lamb -- and in some ways the ideal figurehead -- to placate the brand-new overwhelming Democratic majority which took over the U.S. Congress in the wake of Watergate. His one real transgression in this respect was the Nixon pardon.

It takes some digging to uncover the congressional background which accounted for most of Ford's political life and which received so little attention in his funeral coverage, but here's a taste (courtesy of Dana Blankenhorn) recounted by Peggy Noonan back in May 2006:


This is what Gerald Ford's long career had trained him for. He vetoed 66 bills of the U.S. Congress, mostly for spending excesses, and was sustained in all but 12. But he was powerless to stop, or even articulate, the calamitous treachery of Congress's termination of funding for the South Vietnamese military defense against the Communist North Vietnamese. (You can't veto a refusal to pass a funding bill.) This was the instance in which his famous affability was a disastrous liability. The long ridiculed "domino argument" proved itself true during Ford's presidency, costing the lives of more than a million Cambodians and perhaps half as many of our Vietnamese allies.

That's real blood on American hands, and all of Gerald Ford's much lauded decency, fairness, and nonpartisanship couldn't -- or didn't -- prevent it.

I'm amazed at the silence during the past week about the striking parallels between the time of Ford's presidency and our own: the election of a fiercely vindictive Democratic Congress during a period of inflamed emotion over foreign policy, while a Republican president is rendered weak by charges of corruption and failure within the ranks of his own party. Was all the praise we heard for Gerald Ford a subliminal suggestion that his was truly the most virtuous course -- bending to the irrational tide of reaction and denial?

Even the current President Bush seemed to be swept up in the desire to worship the spotless nonpartisanship of Gerald Ford. Or was George W. Bush a captive in this circumstance of his own native decency? There were times during some of the eulogies offered at the National Cathedral when I thought I saw the old steel in his his eyes, perhaps because of something being intimated from the pulpit...

Perhaps Tom Brokaw, or some of the old "realists" in the Ford funeral congregation, are looking forward to another costly lapse in American principles about loyalty, but I'm not yet convinced that's true of the President of the United States.

But I am concerned about his penchant for decency. Sometimes, it can lead you astray. I've written before about Gerald Ford's great senatorial counterpart in the Democrat-dominated Congress of the 1960s. I invoked him when the Democrats were threatening to filibuster Republican judicial candidates. I said:


Today we have President Bush's attempt at outreach to the newly Democrat-controlled Congress. His attempt at compromise is already being mocked by reports of what Speaker Pelosi intends to accomplish during the "First Hundred Hours." Recent reports suggest the Democrats are planning to run roughshod over any Republican attempts to modify legislation passed during those first hundred hours (i.e., three weeks in human time).


What are we to make, then, of all the recent praise of Gerald Ford's nonpartisanship? Is this simply a convenient opportunity to fool Republicans yet again by appealing to their civility? Is it a sly restatement of the fundamental Democrat principle that nonpartisanship is an obligation that attaches only to Republicans? Or is it instead a ringing affirmation of the liberal article of faith that the only good Republican is one who loses constantly and dies quietly and humbly?

Well, I can't think that Gerald R. Ford would consent in any of these perversions of his character. He was the great ally of Everett Dirksen. He was a champion athlete who knew a great deal about battling and winning, despite an adult experience to the contrary. What would he really think about the various attempts to use him and his funeral for political purposes?

Many of the media pundits were eager to cite the source of Gerald Ford's title for his autobiography, A Time to Heal. It comes from Ecclesiastes, of course. The entire quote reads:


I think Gerald Ford wouldn't much approve of the rhetoric and hypocrisy of Nancy Pelosi. He was an old-time Republican who defined himself in opposition to the excesses of New Deal liberalism. But he also knew immorality when he saw it. And is it sheer coincidence when we encounter multiple references to "time" in this account of Everett Dirksen's heroic fight for the Civil Rights bill of 1984?


President Ford would have been appalled at the high-handed tactics of such a scant majority as Nancy Pelosi commands. And he certainly would not have countenanced any subliminal attempt to use the occasion of his death to force "nonpartisanship" on his colleagues in the name of reestablishing the Democratic dictatorship which coerced him into accepting a genocide his Episcopalian soul unquestionably regretted for the 40 years he lived beyond his presidency. If he was willing to end his political career to heal the nation, he'd also have traded it -- if he'd known how -- to save two million Indochinese lives.

Wherever he is now, I suspect he's opposed to making Iraq into a Cambodian-Vietnamese genocide. He may even be holding an "Ev and Jerry" press conference in heaven to protest it.

God rest his soul, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Including Nancy. And Jimmy.

Amen.

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