A tip of the hat to a nice guy

Gerald Ford, the unassuming nice guy president has died. I often disagreed with him but never for one minute thought ill of him. He was just the kind of president the US needed after the nightmare of Richard Nixon and the constitutional crisis he was responsible for. He was criticized by many for his pardon of Nixon and that is in fact probably what cost him the election. This long haired dope smoking hippie agreed with that decision at the time. In retrospect I'm not so sure - it might have been better to hang the son of a bitch by the balls in public and leave his carcass hanging in DC for future politicians to see.

Update
Ed Morrissey has a good post on the pardon, Ford did it for all the right reasons but in retrospect it was probably not a good decision. Here a little piece but go read the entire thing.

Ford had good and understandable reasons for his decision, but it did short-circuit the one quality about America that had always made us different from other nations: our leaders were not above the law. In an era where we started to discover the worst about leaders such as Nixon, LBJ, and even JFK, we lost that sense of ourselves as a nation bound by its dedication to the Constitution and the rule of law. At that time, we needed a way to bind ourselves back to that to restore a national identity in which all could share.

And I would argue that if Ford intended the pardon as a healing gesture, it didn't work. Our politics have remained poisoned by Watergate, and I believe that the Nixon pardon has contributed to that.