The smearing begins

December 28, 2006

I wondered this morning whether Gerald Ford’s embargoed criticism of the Bush White House and the war in Iraq might affect the right’s praise of the former president this week. As it turns out, the blowback didn’t take long.

Consider Bill Bennett’s fairly aggressive attack on Ford this morning. (via John Cole)

Since “decency” seems to be the watchword of the day and the consensus modifier for Jerry Ford (a view with which I generally concur), may I nevertheless be permitted to ask this: just how decent, how courageous, is what Jerry Ford did with Bob Woodward? He slams Bush & Cheney to Woodward in 2004, but asks Woodward not to print the interview until he’s dead. If he felt so strongly about his words having a derogatory affect, how about telling Woodward not to run the interview until after Bush & Cheney are out of office?

The effect of what Ford did is to protect himself, ensuring he can’t be asked by others about his critiques, ensuring that there can be no dialogue. The way Ford does it with Woodward, he doesn’t have to defend himself…he simply drops it into Bob Woodward’s tape recorder and let’s the bomb go off when fully out of range, himself. This is not courage, this is not decent.

I guess it’s fair to say the hagiography period is over for some of Ford’s former allies on the right?

For what it’s worth, I think John’s right about Ford’s motivations: “[T]he reason Ford did not speak out is because all of the aforementioned blowhards would have savaged him for not keeping his opinions to himself, as former President’s are ‘supposed to do’. I think we can all agree that had Ford come out against the war, these same knuckleheads would have called him Jimmy Carter Ford or the like.”

I think Ford, like every decent Republican of his generation (there really were some) knew what would happen if he so much as looked askance at The Decider or commented upon His Works. These pipsqueaks can trying smearing him all they want. All they’re doing is smearing themselves, providing more fodder for future historians.

  • Bill Bennet, the living definition of the word “Ignoranus” (n.): A person who’s both stupid and an asshole (the Washington Post’s top winner for “new words” in its annual neologisms contest).

    And what he has to say is the perfect demonstration of the Dopeler effect (n.) The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

    In the end, he’s just another Rightie covered in Bozone (n.) The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating.
    The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

  • I doubt that Ford particulary cared what rabid extremists had to say about him. I think it’s more likely that A) He didn’t believe in commenting on the policies of a sitting President, and B) He was a loyal republican.

    But it’s good to see that hypocritical sleezebags like Bennett will continue to defend whatever ‘decency’ is convenient to the moment.

  • “He slams Bush & Cheney to Woodward in 2004, but asks Woodward not to print the interview until he’s dead. ”

    Would it have made any difference for the Bush administration had this story been released two years ago?
    Would it have persuaded enought Americans to swing the election into Kerry’s favor?

    To me, the answer to both would be no.

  • Wow, what an asshole Bennett is. I don’t think they’ve even buried Ford yet and Bennett is pissing on his casket already. What. An. Asshole.

    The point here is not that Ford asked Woodward to keep it to himself until after he died, the point is that he said it at all. It didn’t matter the circumstances. Ford could have done the most upstanding thing in the world and Bennett would figure out a way slander him.

  • To paraphrase the so-called “great communicator,” Here they go again. Caught in the mindset that our public figures have to be idolized as heros or despised as bums, we ignore the possibility that maybe Ford did some good things and some not-so-good things. Sometimes, as in pardoning Nixon, he did both at the same time, and I think that’s the case here. He was right to tell Woodward what he did, and wrong to not permit publication sooner. It would have been a fitting way for a former President to serve his country.

    As for BB, Tom Cleaver is right: “Bill Bennet, the living definition of the word ‘Ignoranus.'”

  • I have to disagree, if he couldn’t take the heat, break the presidential code of silence, or whatever, then he should have kept it to himself.

    What I don’t get and what I am really starting to despise is all the people who sat back and kept their powerful mouths shut until it was/is safe. It’s sickening. Maybe if those/these cowards had all found a little backbone, we wouldn’t be knee deep in blood.

    Reminds me of a great MLK quote:
    “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”

    I am not directing this at Ford, but speaking against the establishment from the grave is hardly a deed that needs much courage. Now his family is left to defend his words and take the heat he avoided.

    And this non-sense about criticizing a sitting president or party loyalty is nothing but a cheesy cop-out. If that is your rationalization for not stopping/criticizing a disastrous war/president, then you need to open a book and read about the founding of the very country you inhabit.

  • Posts like these could simply be the definition for the difference between a Republican and a Neocon.

  • Also worth noting is Bennett’s criticism of Ford — that he didn’t ask Woodward to hold off publication until after Bush/Cheney were out of office. That’s the real offense — criticizing a sitting Republican administration. Pathetic.

  • Bill Bennett is a truly brave man. The only person he will debate on CNN’s The Situation Room is that moron Donna Brazile.

  • Typical. Ford thinks the policy is wrong and Bennett says Ford should have:

    “Far more decently, say nothing critical of Bush will be on the record until his presidency is over.”

    After all, the interests of Bush and the party are much more important than the interests of the country.

  • I’m amazed that the difference between myself and Bill (the Addict) Bennett is that I’m annoyed that Gerald Ford didn’t speak his mind before the 2004 election and Bennett is annoyed Gereld Ford didn’t keep his opinion secret until 2009.

    Why anyone listens to a man who sits in Casino Hotel rooms dropping $10 coins in slot machines, alone, is beyond me.

    Is this the best “Screeching Monkey” the wingnuts could mobilize to critize an unburied president?

    Just pathetic!

  • Bill’s just pissed that he lost a bundle in the “Jerry Ford Deathwatch Pool.”

    LOL

    What does Bill Benett know about courage? Or anything else?

    TC mentioning the term Ignoranus covers it.

  • I would criticize Woodward and Ford less than a Presidunce that arranges for Hussein’s execution in time for the Presidunce’s State of the Union lies to the Congress and America’s citizens. Who can believe anything coming out of the the Dumbcider’s mouth any longer?

  • ***This is not courage, this is not decent.***
    —-A fat blowhard commonly referred to as “Billy-Joe-Jim-Bob-Roy Bennett”

    One should consider the source, and realize with neither reservation nor cause for examination, just where this strand of words; this tiny phrase of “This is not courage; this is not decent” is coming from. We are, after all, talking about a somewhat-obese individual who, during his tenure as ED secretary, gathered bits and pieces of various school curriculums—and eventually assembled the pieces/parts of OTHER PEOPLE’S WORK to “create” his own curriculum—which he now peddles nationwide to homeschoolers, religious academies, and public school systems in ultra-conservative distrcts.

    So—to “Shill” Bennett, I say the following:

    You, sir, are neither courageous, nor decent. You are a con artist, and a petty thief….

  • Regardless of whether Bennett is courageous and/or decent, was Ford regarding the condition he set for the Woodward interview?

  • You are truly irony impaired, aren’t you, Thomas? If Bennet wants to confine debate to living people, why is he arguing with a dead guy?

  • I am not irony imparied, and Bennett is not arguing with a dead guy (any more than you or I would “argue with” some other dead person whether his action was courageous and/or decent). Next question?

  • Did Ford offer any comments about his own (and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger’s) role in personally okaying the Indonesian invasion of East Timor using American-supplied arms?

    I’m not that interested in the opinion of one Republican war criminal on another. What, if anything, did Ford have to say about his own bloody handprints on an invasion he deemed okay in light of American economic interests, an action that resulted in the slaughter of over 200,000 East Timorans, about 1/3 of their entire population?

    And, of course, everyone knows Ford’s Secretary of Defense and Chief of Staff were, respectively, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

    And please spare me the “he’s a decent, amiable goof who you’d like to sit down and have a beer with” kind of BS. Hasn’t it become clear enough what this is worth over the last 6 years? You’re thinking Chevy Chase while I’m thinking of more like his new soul brother in hell (if there is such a thing as divine justice), Auguste Pinochet.

  • Bennett sez:
    “ensuring he can’t be asked by others about his critiques, ensuring that there can be no dialogue. The way Ford does it with Woodward, he doesn’t have to defend himself…he simply drops it into Bob Woodward’s tape recorder and let’s the bomb go off when fully out of range, himself. This is not courage, this is not decent.”

    Isn’t this the same as Bush’s townhalls where only the party faithful and bought are allowed to ask questions?

    Doesn’t this mean that Bush is indecent as well?

  • O.K., so now that we have at least some people saying Ford was neither “courageous” nor “decent” for the way he commented to Woodward, we can move on to Bush. Former Dan, your scenario is distinguishable because, regardless of any softball questions asked by party faithful, David Gregory and other reporters with clear liberal bias get to follow-up on Bush’s answers, or ask their own questions, by the next press conference (not to mention daily press briefings by Tony Snow, other interviews with Administration officials, etc.). See the difference?

  • So, Thomas, because reporters like David Gregory ask pertinent followup questions (see “Intrepid Reporter” job description) of a public (your) employee (President’s Press Secretary), this demonstrates “clear liberal bias?”

    Uh, okay.

    See, I didn’t ask any followup questions. I must agree with you and not have a clear liberal bias!

    Happy New Year. I’ve been celebrating already since early November.

    You?

  • We are already arguing the media liberal bias (I’m talking network and national newspapers) over on Kerry’s picture thread. You have to admit at least NPR has a leftist bent, right? You are welcome to join in over there.

  • Thanks, Thomas, but I thought I read the words “clear liberal bias” in an earlier post of yours here, so I thought it was appropriate to respond on this thread.

    Thanks for your clear conservative direction on what constitutes the liberal media. Two points – first of all, when another viewpoint other than just rightwing talking points ala Fox gets airtime (like on NPR), that makes it “centrist” not “liberal.”

    And, being a longtime “leftist,” I hardly find NPR to be anything but centrist in a refreshing way. Who wants to just listen to my own (leftist) viewpoints being expounded endlessly (mindlessly) or to endure right wing extremists on the other side.

    Right? Go NPR! Right?

  • LOL! That’s right, NPR is most definitely “centrist” — where are you posting from? Havana?

  • Well, Bedford, Indiana, actually – the reddest part of the first red state called for Bush in 2000.

    I guess a true American would never disagree with you, Thomas, so I must be some kind of Commie, eh? Love freedom, don’t ya’? By the way, I’m also a mainstream Christian and a veteran. What was that? Did your head just explode?

    No, I really don’t think NPR is leftist in any way. They offer progressive voices in discussion as they offer many conservative voices in their discussion. I don’t think I can recall hearing any Communists or Socialists (that would be “leftists,” Thomas) on there in quite a while. As a leftist myself, I think my opinion carries some weight in this discussion.

  • ***So, do we agree with Bennett that Ford was a coward or not?***
    ———————————————————————————————Thomas

    No….we do not. President Ford established, in the form of an interview, a document of historical significance. He has said, in that interview, a great many things that many Republicans—including your obvious master, Bennett the Buffoon, and his partners-in-crime at the White House—have spent a good deal of time trying to cover up.

    The things that President Ford said in his interview are now a part of an historical record that Bennett the Buffoon cannot easily revise—and Bennett the Buffoon is lashing out in the only way he knows how—not by offering even a smidgen of “counterpoint” to what the President has said, but to blindly swiftboat the messenger. That would make Bennett the Buffoon out as “lacking in courage”—yes?

    It’s the foundation of Neoconservativism, Tommie—attack the messenger, in hopes that the message never reaches the masses. And is keeping the truth from the masses a decent thing to do, Tommie?

    But in this case—the message has now arrived.

    And again, I reiterate the fact that Bennett the Buffoon knows not the meaning of either word: “Courage” and “Decent.”

    Answer me this, Tommie. Answer everyone on this blog. Answer the world at large, if you will. Can Bennett the Buffoon counter any of what President Ford said in that interview?

    Can he?

    I thought as much….

  • Well, if we can’t even agree on NPR or the cowardly way Ford commented to Woodward — I doubt this explanation will go over well either — I guess it can’t hurt though:

    Using perfect 20/20 hindsight, I agree with Ford that stressing WMD was a mistake, however, the best guess by every intelligence agency in the world put Saddam on top of a boatload of WMD, so there was really no other practical choice but to get rid of him. If Ford were still alive, we could ask him to justify the invasion of Cambodia and why that was a vital American interest but Iraq wasn’t. We could ask him to explain the apparent discrepancies between his public endorsements of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld vs. what he told Woodward, etc., etc.

    See the point now?

  • I just noticed this at the end of the Washington Post article on Ford’s interview with Woodward:

    In the end, though, it was Vietnam and the legacy of the retreat he presided over that most troubled Ford. After Saigon fell in 1975 and the United States evacuated from Vietnam, Ford was often labeled the only American president to lose a war. The label always rankled.

    “Well,” he said, “I was mad as hell, to be honest with you, but I never publicly admitted it.”

    We will just have to guess now whether Ford was secretly hoping to somehow make George Bush the second American president to lose a war?

  • Au contraire, Tommy. Did you read my earliest post on this thread re Ford and East Timor? Of course I agree with you that Ford is a coward. I’m sure we have many points of agreement, just like I do with the good ol’ boys around here. Ford has good reason to fear the wrath of his own kind, other Republican war criminals and the ethically-challenged like Bennett.

    Did you know that Copernicus (a Roman Catholic priest) held onto his scientific papers for thirty years until he was on his deathbed, because he feared offering a dissent to the teachings of the political power of his day (the Roman Catholic Church)? He ended up sending his papers to a Lutheran press for publication (even though Lutherans at that time also thought the Bible taught geocentrism).

    My point is (thanks for bearing with me), that Ford was no more (or less) a coward than Copernicus. Ford was smart enough based on his own experience in Republican politics, to know what the amoral right-wing capitalist boot-licker, war-criminal element of his party was capable of and he didn’t want to deal with it while he was still alive. Who can blame him?

    Anyone blame him for East Timor mass slaughter, by the way? Just asking.

  • I was actually answering Steve’s questions (he was the one saying we don’t agree on Ford being a coward). You and I simply don’t agree on NPR.

  • Perhaps this is just a semantics and being-precise thing.

    I guess I don’t “get” what you mean about NPR being leftist. I think of leftist as being a member or sympathizer of the Communist or Socialist parties and the like (I’m a Christian Socialist myself – Socialism has a proud progressive history in parts of the midwest – see especially, Milwaukee, where I’m from). It’s just a political party with a point of view, Thomas.

    Most liberals are no more “leftists” than most conservatives are “fascists.” My dad, a war veteran and liberal laborite and progressive, would have a big problem if you called him a leftist. I also have a problem with one painting with a too-broad brush.

    Perhaps you could enlighten me by pointing out some of the “leftists” who are infesting the airwaves of NPR? I’d like to write to them and discuss our hidden agenda for smashing the state, but I don’t know who they could possibly be.

  • Well, keep in mind the ideological bent (and “bent” is a very good word here!) these people have. In his time, Barry Goldwater was called “Mr. Conservative,” but to today’s extremists on the right, he’s practically a Marxist.

  • The point being, if Goldwater’s to liberal for them, they certainly have no love for Ford…

  • Actually, Thomas, I’m having a problem with “every intelligence agency in the world” putting Saddam atop a boatload of WMD. UN weapons inspectors debunked that theory long before “Shock and Awe” ever occurred. The only actual “intelligence” backing the theory was NSA; even CIA was having second thoughts on the isue before the invasion.

    One should also take note that, when the Ford/Woodard interview took place, the oratorical fashion of the day was for blood-n-guts commentators to openly call for executing Supreme Court justices and the like—establishing a societal symbiance between Ford’s dilemna, and that of Copernicus (as mentioned by cpw). Especially given the curent administration’s overt willingness to look th other way, and consider open comments about assassinaring officials of the United states to be “just kidding around.”

    Here’s an idea—go out into the streets tomorrow, and openly call for the assassination of Chief Justice Roberts. Let me know where to send the file-in-a-cake, so you can break out of jail.

    As for ‘Nam, that disater was a lost cause before Nixon got to his first term. Ford was just “the guy behind the desk” when Saigon fell. Blaming him for the lass in ‘Nam is equal to giving Truman credit for winning WW-2.

    East Timor? Ford got suckered into that one by Kissinger—and people ought to be sensible enough to know that one, as well. “Henry” had all the puppet-strings in his hands then, just as Cheney has a whole bunch of them in his hands now. He (Kissinger) was also looking for some saving grace on his career; the clusterf*** of losing a war was not going to look good on his resume….

    Was Ford an effective President? No. The man could have walked on water while magically transforming Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley into teenagers again; people would have rejected him. He had less name-recognition that Carter; his foreign-policy skills were rougher than a pile of broken glass, and Chevy Chase’s impersonations (including the talk-show fiasco) didn’t help, either. But his real failure was the pardoning of Nixon.

    Does that make him a coward? No—but it sure as hades makes him guilty of obstructing justice. It also implicates him, directly, as an after-the-fact accessory to the crimes committed by Nixon.

    It makes him responsible for the first great breakdown of the American system of justice—and that could have been the driving force behind the Woodard interview….

  • NPR is SOO liberal.
    Nothing chaps my hide more than having to listen to the mindless commie drivel on Car Talk.

    And when Nancy Wilson hosts Jazz Profiles, it’s like listening to Castro drone on.

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