Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Gerald Goddamned Ford | Features | The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper:

The first month of Gerald Goddamned Ford’s presidency, as detailed in Barry Werth’s recent book 31 Days, turned out to be one of the biggest disasters in American history. Ford failed the one mission that mattered: not pardoning Richard Nixon. The only thing he had to do to come out of the presidency with a legacy was not pardon Richard Nixon. It took Ford a month to fuck that up and then he dared to announce that “our long national nightmare is over.”

That’s bullshit, and we’ll get to precisely why in a moment. First, it has to be said that the stench of Gerald Goddamned Ford, the Presidential Shitrag, lingers in the White House to this day. Though he opted to not nominate the odious George H. W. Bush as his vice president, choosing instead Nelson Rockefeller, Ford hired men whose names we’re still living with today: Dick Cheney replaced Donald Rumsfeld as Chief of Staff after Ford named Rumsfeld Secretary of Defense. It was Ford that gave both these men toe-holds in the Executive Branch, positions that paid off big for them and, um, for us, 25 years later.