Posted on 12/31/2006 9:55:56 AM PST by 13Sisters76
Death Does Wonders for a Legacy By Michael Reagan FrontPageMagazine.com | December 29, 2006
Saddam Hussein is a lucky man – in no time at all he can expect to have his reputation vastly improved. And he can thank the hangman who awaits him on the gallows.
Prior to that moment when he breathes his last, his reputation will be in shreds. He has, rightly, been seen as a monster. The mere act of his dying, however, will enable his supporters to smooth over his role in those troublesome times when he was slaughtering his own people by the hundreds of thousands.
If you doubt that scenario, consider what we are now witnessing with the death of former President Gerald R. Ford. After his pardon of Richard Nixon in September 1974, you would have had to hire a private detective to find anyone who did not consider him a scoundrel for pardoning the hated Nixon, whose foes would have been satisfied only if Nixon had been utterly humiliated, tried, found guilty and sent to prison for life.
Ford robbed them of that satisfaction and they never forgave him, but his foes did take great pleasure out of observing that the pardon was the reason why Gerald Ford lost the presidency in 1976.
His name was mud, yet by dying he rehabilitated himself. All those hypocrites who cast him out into the outer darkness for daring to show compassion to his predecessor -- thereby saving the nation from the years-long ordeal prosecution of Nixon would have involved -- now heap praise on him.
Ford’s pardon was greeted by a firestorm of criticism, threats were leveled against him, and he was accused of making a shady deal with Tricky Dick to swap a pardon for the presidency. All the hatred and bile the left had for Nixon was then aimed at Ford.
His popularity ratings, sky-high when he took the oath of office, plummeted. He never recovered from the debacle he unleashed with the pardon. And he was driven out of the White House to be replaced by Jimmy Carter, who would become arguably the worst president in American history yet go himself into the honored retirement denied Gerald Ford.
Like most of his Democratic colleagues, Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy was appalled by the pardon, calling it "a betrayal of the public trust."
Unlike most of his Democratic colleagues, however, Kennedy softened and didn’t wait until Ford was dead to praise him for what the pardon had done for the nation. At the 2001 Profile of Courage award ceremony honoring Ford, Kennedy said: "We now recognize that Ford was there when the country needed him. He was calm and steady at a time of emotional upheaval and disillusionment. When he said our long national nightmare was over, the country breathed a sigh of relief. He was an uncommonly good and decent man."
In dying, Ford erased all those negative comments and the people who slandered and reviled him came rushing to the microphones to heap praise on him for issuing the pardon they had so vigorously condemned.
Think about the lesson Ford’s death teaches. Once a pariah, he now gets the “de mortuis nil nisi bonum” treatment (of the dead speak only good).
Moreover, he is to be further honored by a book by Bob Woodward who, contrary to his usual practice, interviewed him while he was still alive and conscious. Ford, he is said to be ready to reveal, opposed the Iraq war but didn’t want anybody to know it until he was gone.
Getting back to what all this means to the soon-to-be-dead Saddam Hussein, if the obits are anything like the ones Gerald Ford earned by passing away, we can expect to be told that after all, Saddam did clean up the mess he inherited in Iraq, and keep order and prevent the population from butchering each other by taking on that job himself.
He introduced law and order, and kept the peace, although in not quite the same way Rudy Giuliani cleaned up New York City. Giuliani, after all, left no unmarked mass graves scattered around New York.
But hey, Saddam got results even we haven’t been able to achieve, and as a result the Iraqis have now taken on the job of reducing the population without any help from the government.
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To his credit, he did try to plead with Congress to keep our promises to the So Vietnamese, but all in all, remained exactly what the left had wanted. The media made fun of him relentlessly as a buffoon and the radical left continued its "birthing process", turning the demonRAT party into what it is now. Ford helped "heal" the country? Bullhockey. We as a people entered a long period of self hatred and growing oppression at the hands of the PC left. Our protectors, the military and police, were reduced to being the ever-present "bad guys" and no cop I knew at the time felt comfortable admitting to civilians what he did for a living. This is the time where the practices of the left against our soldiers (spitting on them, making evil phone calls to families who had lost their sons) began. There was NO "healing" until "we the people" stuck a finger in their eye and elected Reagan by a landslide.
Nixon didn't need to broker a deal with the Democrats, he was caving in to them on so many issues that Nixon figured he was building enough good will that they would not impeach him. Nixon's greatest betrayal was to the office of the presidency, not Watergate. (And I was a staunch supporter of him during that time.)
Nixon was very anti-communist, as Democrats kept moving to the left. There was a fear of communist infiltration within the Democrat party and I will always believe this was the motivating factor behind Nixon's actions. Gordon Liddy does not say that but I still believe it.
Well .. the impeachment process continued for Nixon even after he resigned. What happened was THERE WAS NOT SUFFICIENT EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT.
Conspiracy theories are fine .. but they have to have some form of accurate facts to support them.
Since Articles of Impeachment could not be realized for Nixon .. I'd say the pardon was exactly the right thing to do.
As for the dems in congress .. remember one of the members of the impeachment team was a lawyer by the name of HILLARY CLINTON. And .. she committed crimes (according to Jerry Zeifman who wrote a book, "Hillary's Pursuit of Power") in order to try to get Nixon out of office. Jerry was Chief Counsel of the House Judiciary Committee.
The left's treatment of Nixon, Ford, and Reagan is the same treatment they give Bush. If you're a repub - you're dirt.
As for the media making fun of Ford .. it was a replay during these Bush years. Nothing has changed. The liberals believe they are "entitled" to rule .. and when repubs win - EVERY REPUB IS CALLED STUPID, ARROGANT, IDIOT, etc.
But .. you're right .. it won't stop until we get angry enough and find a person with enough spine to put us back on the RIGHT track.
Pres. Gerald Ford was non-threatening and utterly inept as a leader. He always bent to the will of the lib Dems.
And he never pushed through any kind of legislation or ideas conservative Republicans of today would like.
Still, most people at the time were subconsciously thankful to him for stepping up to the political plate in 1974.
Regardless if you were pro-Nixon, anti-Nixon, anti-lamestream media, or anything else: after months and years of incessant hearings and "revelations" of corruption, most people were simply glad to move on.
We decided that some of the problem is that a lot of the people commenting on the Ford administration were too young or too out-of-it to be aware of what actually happened during that time, and some have been brainwashed by the MSM because they don't remember and have had their heads filled with what they now think are memories. A good many Republicans are hoping to use this to advance their agenda of returning the party to the days pre-Reagan. They dislike conservatives almost as much as the Democrats, but have been willing to go along for the ride to be able to wield power since conservatism wins elections every time it's tried.
I like Michael Reagan, but this is a silly argument. Gerald Ford did the right thing. He was a good man in a terrible spot. And the press is admitting he was a good man, now, because he was, and there's no longer any political gain from saying otherwise.
Saddam was not a good man. And he has few friends, even in the Arab world. No doubt the leftist press will try to use him to score political points, but if they do they will be stupid, because it's not going to convince anyone.
They may continue to say that the trial was rushed and unfair, but no one is going to bother trying to turn Saddam into a hero.
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