BookMark, for a Great story, FRiend.
May God guide our course.
Tatt
Well, one good story begets another. Enjoy!
I attended a national convention of Young Americans for Freedom (likely in 1975) after Feckless Gerald Ford had inherited the job of POTUS courtesy of the Trickster who probably saw Ford's status as VPOTUS as Nixon's guaranty that Congress would not do such damage to America as to remove Nixon in favor of a dangerous dolt like Ford. That certainly worked out well didn't it? Even Nixon failed to gasp what enemies of our country the Demonrat Congressional majority had become after McGovern's hostile takeover of that party.
We conservatives were enraged with Nixon over the China trip, wage and price controls, devaluing the dollar, creating the Envirowhacko Protection Agency, appointing Herod Blackmun and Clueless Lewis Powell to SCOTUS, Roe vs. Wade, the SALT Treaty, detente, and many. many other issues.
Next up as (the only unelected) POTUS: Bumbling Gerry Ford. He named Nelson Rockefeller as VPOTUS, shut down the Vietnam War altogether that had cost us 50,000 young men at arms, demoralized the Gulag prisoners by snuggling with Brezhnev, continued Nixon/Kissinger cowardice in the face of Brezhnev, was willing to negotiate away our weapons advantages, was downright hostile (along with his wife Betty) to any and all social conservatives, enacted a 55 MPH national speed limit, refused to invite Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the White House lest we offend the soviets in the same year when Solzhenitsyn was the commencement speaker at Harvard!
One asset that Ford did have was his verrrrry lovely seventeen year old daughter Susan. Betty Ford was invited by CBS Network to be interviewed by Morley Safer. This became fodder for Bill to address the social liberalism of Gerald and Betty Ford for an appreciative and largely young male audience, eagerly contemplating Susan in spite of her ancestry.
Safer asked the clueless Betty Ford as to her views on teenaged Susan becoming perhaps involved in a sexual affair. Betty, not bright enough to recognize that this question was supposed to elicit a response from Betty that, like all fashionable and responsible parents, she would take "nubile young Susan" (as Buckley memorably phrased it) right on down to Planned Barrenhood to get a prescription for birth control pills, be fitted for an IUD or diaphragm, a supply of spermicide, and a frank discussion on the easy availability of abortion if chosen contraceptive methods failed and, of course, nary a word on abstinence.
Instead Betty said it would depend on the "qualifications of the young man." Bill asked: What qualifications might pique Mrs. Ford's interest in a young man? That he be handsome? Certainly Susan herself would be a better judge of the looks of a potential lover! That he be rich? That would seem to violate the spirit of the age of relentless equality! That he be of high social standing? Ditto! That he be a high-powered intellectual? How would Betty Ford know?
Bill Buckley wrapped up by saying that inevitably we are led to the conclusion that Mrs. Ford had not thought the matter through and that she was quite incapable of thinking the matter through. Elegantly, Bill left the bleeding corpse of Betty Ford's reputation in the gutters. We left, determined to nominate Ronaldus Maximus instead and it took two more tries but it was well worth it.
May God bless you and yours!