A half-century ago, a now widely forgotten forerunner of Mad King Donald held sway. As a replacement for Richard “Not A Crook” Nixon’s first veep- the brazenly crooked, shamefully unpunished Spiro “Bag Man” Agnew- Gerald Rudolf ‘Not A Reindeer’ Ford became an unelected, unvetted, pig-in-a-poke POTUS.
At his 8/9/1974 inauguration, he connoted that, confronting Nixon’s power grab, the system had worked. Was working. And always would work.
“Our long national nightmare is over,” he honked. We comprise, he went on, “a Republic… of laws and not of men. Here, the people rule.”
If only. Weeks later, he chose to prevent laws from applying to the fraught, flagrant, crook who’d appointed him (to stand next in line). Doing so, Ford willfully prolonged (in perpetuity, it now seems) our nightmare of rule with impunity- thereby assuaging his own pique at the prospect of the long arm of justice duly grabbing his dear ex-boss.
Let it be stressed: had we, the people truly ruled, no way would the foister of enemies lists, coverup, obstruction, and so on gone his merry way (to collect, for some 20 years, a robust pension paid for by said populace, by the way).
For a textbook case of ‘heed what they do, not what they say,’ it’s hard to beat President Ford. Governed not by laws but by party loyalist flaws, he went on to lift (in 1975) to the lofty perch of White House chief of staff a 34 year old firebrand who touted more, not less, clout for the office that lately had epitomized the 1887 adage “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
For his part (and Ford’s), Dick Cheney sought a “unitary” executive- where secret, dark, uncurbed, Nixonian misdeeds, skullduggery, misdemeanors, and high crimes might well become SOP.
What could go wrong? Well, not to mince words, Cheney went to war on behalf of uncurbed clout- against the checks and balances we’d revered from Day One.
“Unitary.” As in, one supreme unit. Worse even that the self-serving stance of the “men” whom Ford purported to eschew, the GOP bad guys’ casus belli can only mean one thing: an uncurbed, despotically power-crazed man (or woman). (Period.)
That is (as George ‘WMD’ Bush reportedly put it), one “Decider.” (Which, given the GOP’s high-handed history (from, say, “Low Blow” Joe McCarthy to ‘Donnie Antoinette’ Trump, long since should have prompted all true patriots to point out how close, any way you slice it “Decider” is to “Dictator.”)
There’s more. Incrementally, we, the people, made bold to balk at Cheney’s interest-conflicted, grossly deceitful (see Charles Lewis’s 2014 expose 935 Lies) propulsion of Bush’s Treasury gutting, morality flushing, falsely pretexted invasion/ occupation of Iraq.
So much so, by January, 2009, we keened to ride the bumptious Halliburton baron out of town on a rail; by then, his approval rating was roughly on par with Ford (no relation to Gerry) Pintos; at 13% (!), it bespoke nearly NINE IN TEN of us having grown wise to Tricky Dickie II’s Nixon-like, Trump-presaging perfidy.
Granted, Cheney wound up critiquing Trump. But hey. At our peril do we effectively memory hole the late-in-life ‘liberty & justice for all’ cynosure’s all too telling past. To be sure, his eventual darts at our orange ogre were most welcome. Alas, his overall record can’t help but connote (if not denote) ‘unitary sway for me & mine; rule of law for thee & thine.’
Sigh. For all his bald hypocrisy, Rachel Maddow (main author of the jaw-dropping take on Agnew, Bag Man) showed up to hear (if not tacitly condone) Cheney being lauded as an unstinting, lifelong “giant.”
To be sure, such worthies as Anthony Fauci, James Carville, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, and Joe & Jill Biden mourned along with Dr. Maddow. So, who the hell does the Inspector think he is, raising such a fuss in this few holds barred spiel?
Be it resolved: the more truth, the better off we’ll be. As Ford’s first chief of staff (pre-Cheney), and as Bush’s defense secretary (in lockstep with Bush’s veep, Cheney), Donald Rumsfeld joins Cheney (viz. in 935 Lies) as a fibber/ democracy underminer of the hard right order.
Like it or not, recall it or not, such stuff bespeaks an axis of rarely exhumed evil. In September, 2022, Rumsfeld snarled, “We know [Iraqis] have weapons of mass destruction. THERE ISN’T ANY DEBATE ABOUT IT” (emphasis added).
Hmm. No debate. That is to say, NO RIGHT to fully informed, freely fact-steeped public discussion- the gist of what the whole, now largely memory holed Bush regime demanded. Culminating (till Trump came along) in Dubya and his Halliburton halberd, the line from McCarthy to Nixon to Ford to Bush/ Cheney/ Rumsfeld to Agent Orange looms bright red. (And, to mix tropes, flashing.)
At this late date, we need to resolve it as a line in the sand- in a desertifying democracy now ruled by a divisive, destructive cult that, poignantly enough, in living memory dubbed itself “The Party of Lincoln.” (As in of/ by/ for the people. Sad.)
