She was a classless drunken cow.
Who amounted to more than you. Think about it.
Have some respect for the dead As*hole..
Aren't we all?!
Geez......
You’re the whipping boy, boy. There is one needed on every thread.
First Lady Betty Ford ... may she rest in pease.
Reagan was famous for preaching adherence to the “11th commandment,” namely: “Thou shalt not speak ill of thy fellow Republicans.”
You seem to be more familiar with drunkeness than class!
If you mean she wasn’t a snob or world elitist who was able to care for her fellow man, you are correct.
We shopped at the same supermarket and she didn’t mind saying hello to her fellow shoppers and didn’t attempt to use her status to gain privilege.
I wish all the First Ladies shared her attributes.
That is one of the nastiest comments I have ever heard. She did more to help alcoholics than anyone since Bill Wilson. Shame on you.
That was a loathsome and repugnant thing to write about her, or anyone, at a time like this.
I was shocked at what Fox played I don’t remember much about her while she was in the Whitehouse.I was 13 in 1974 so probably not paying full attetion.
I don't know if she was or not but you sure are blunt aren't you? ha
I personally think we need more straight talk like yours not less.
Shame on you for soiling this website with your hatred
“She was a classless drunken cow.”
A stupid. ignorant, nasty and creepy thing to say about a former Republican first lady.
DJ MacWoW made an important point when he posted on Friday, July 08, 2011 10:19:43 PM: “I always thought conservatives were the ones with manners. I guess not.”
Others have said a lot of things criticizing you, American Ranger, but there are things which I think are important but which have not been said.
And frankly, it's a bigger issue than Betty Ford.
I have serious concerns about where some parts of the Tea Party movement are going. If we start adopting the rudeness, obnoxiousness, and other methods of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals,” we will find that the methods are not neutral. They are part of a dangerous ideology that includes disrespect for order and authority, and will take us as conservatives into places we do not want to go.
As Recovering Ex-hippie posted on Friday, July 08, 2011 10:38:47 PM: “I agree with you...disgusting comments posted. What is freeper coming to? Those comments are the ones you might see on the DailyKos or Moveon.”
Rudeness and obnoxiousness are part-and-parcel of the liberal method of egalitarianism and social leveling. People in public office (and in this case, former First Ladies) do deserve a certain level of respect based on both biblical principles and common sense. We're conservatives; we're not community organizers, and we most certainly are not anarchists.
How, as conservatives, should we deal with a political wife who voluntarily chooses to enter the political arena on her own and who says things which embarrassed not only her children but also her husband (who, BTW, was usually too much of a gentleman to publicly criticize his wife)? Mrs. Ford did voluntarily choose to enter the political fray, and her views are open to criticism — but there's a right way and a wrong way to do it.
First off, some background. How did someone like Betty Ford ever end up on the national Republican political scene, anyway?
I grew up in Grand Rapids and lived in West Michigan most of my life until about a decade ago. My father knew Gerald Ford and his family, and knew the Fords well from years in politics, long before Congressman Ford was named vice-president and then became president. Mrs. Ford's blunt tongue was well-known long before it became a public problem — being a Republican feminist supporting the Equal Rights Amendment and a pro-choice view on abortion back in the 1960s and 1970s may not have been a liability on the national political scene, but those issues most emphatically were problems in a very conservative community like Grand Rapids.
Her personal issues with alcohol were not widely known in public, but they were privately known in political circles, back in the day when such things simply were not publicly discussed in polite company. Frankly (and sadly), her hard drinking got excused by a lot of people who thought it was just part-and-parcel of her aggressive personality. There was a time when men's ability to drink lots of alcohol was viewed as a strength and not a weakness, and people thought that Mrs. Ford's drinking was part of her image of being “tough.”
In discussing a pre-women’s rights era, it is impossible to extricate the political careers of women from those of their husbands. Divorce was virtually unheard of when the Fords entered politics (though the Ford family was actually a rare exception with President Ford's own father and Mrs. Ford's own divorce and remarriage), and the modern Congressional “second wives club” with powerful men routinely ditching their hometown wives for a politically powerful inside-the-beltway Washington wife with her own career would have been inconceivable. People back then got married much earlier and usually stayed married, so if a politician had a wife who differed from himself in important ways, people weren't as quick to blame the husband for his wife's views.
Gerald Ford had been elected to Congress as a war hero shortly after World War II as an anti-corruption candidate to help defeat the McKay political machine, which had ruled Grand Rapids Republican politics with methods only slightly less dirty than those which Mayor Daley later used to run Chicago Democratic politics. Unlike many local politicians of his day, Ford was honest, and with Grand Rapids voters that counted a great deal after decades of political corruption, but his political ideology had always been moderate with more ties to the New England Republican bluebloods than the conservative wing of the Republican Party. As Grand Rapids became farther and farther out of step with national liberal trends, it's very unlikely someone with Ford's views could have been elected in Grand Rapids by the 1960s if Ford had not been a powerful incumbent and eventually House Minority Leader.
President Ford had his own issues; I was a supporter of Ronald Reagan in 1980 when virtually everyone else I knew in Grand Rapids politics thought we'd thrown away the election, Goldwater-style, by nominating him. Attacking Ford's policies is fair game, but let's remember that he lived in a different day and a different time when the two political parties were not as different as they are today, when war heroes were respected by most people in both parties, and when a man like Ford with a reputation for strict honesty could be respected as an “honest broker” even by people who didn't agree with him.
While I have no firsthand or even secondhand knowledge about what attracted Gerald Ford to Betty Ford, from what I have been told, Gerald Ford's reputation for honesty and Betty Ford's reputation for unvarnished candor were far from being incompatible. That's the best explanation I've heard for their relationship, and it may explain a great deal. At least it's better than the typical situation today of people getting divorced every time they have what two generations ago would have been considered an important but secondary disagreement.
Now DJ MacWoW wrote this: “I believe FR has been changing along with society in general” on Friday, July 08, 2011 11:16:26 PM.
MacWow is right. And that change is not good.
Again, as STARWISE wrote: “all the others who resort to
sinking to DU levels of coarseness and nastiness ..
don’t grasp is that they’re in a privately owned
and the #1 conservative site online that’s constantly
monitored and targeted by the vocal enemies of
conservatism. Those comments DO reflect badly on the entire site, and hurt the place by giving the nasty left the fodder
they crave.”
In contrast to many of the attacks on here by people who have been described as “haters” of Mrs. Ford, Outlaw Woman has kept her criticisms focused on Ford's support for abortion.
That's legitimate.
Attacking her views on that issue is entirely appropriate. Same for her views on several other issues. But calling her a “classless drunken cow” is a personal attack that is unwarranted.
Why?
It is on that very issue of alcohol that Mrs. Ford did the most good. Before her, the issue of alcohol was framed mostly in religious terms — if you were a conservative Christian (unless you were Lutheran, Catholic or Dutch) you were a teetotaler. Otherwise, in a lot of circles, you were supposed to be a hard drinker to prove you were a man.
By going public with her addiction and the damage it caused, Mrs. Ford was able to show to a non-religious liberal audience how much damage alcohol was doing. I'd argue that providing a secular example of the value of abstinence did tremendous good for our society. Were Mrs. Ford's underlying reasons good? Definitely not; they were part and parcel of her feminism. But regardless of her reasons, just as we can commend a secular Hollywood celebrity who supports the troops, we can commend a “RINO” like Mrs. Ford who did a great deal of good to show the dangers of alcohol abuse.
Mrs. Ford has been out of public life for many years; it's not like she was regularly showing up on FOX News to say that Republicans need to support abortion. Mrs. Ford may have caused a lot of problems in the past, but she's known now mostly for her dual roles destigmatizing breast cancer and fighting alcoholism. At the time of somebody’s death, let's try to focus on good things that the person has done without trying to whitewash the bad, especially when the damage they did was in the distant past.