Do you know who's utimately responsible for our current situation? [View all]

[cab67]

Gerald Ford.

Yup.

He pardoned Nixon. That opened the door for nearly every really serious scandal to hit the Executive Branch that came after his administration.

Iran-Contra? Invasion of Iraq? Worse than Watergate. Thousands died because of them. And neither might have happened had those in charge thought real consequences were a possibility. Rather than learn from the scorn Nixon faced after his resignation, they learned to hide their tracks better, and they learned that even if caught, they could blame underlings and knew no one would really hold them accountable because it would "divide the country."

As much as I loved Barack Obama as president, I will never forgive him for his decision to "look forward" and not hold the higher-ups in the Jr Administration accountable for the invasion of Iraq, for its grotesque mismanagement, and for decisions that allowed men and women in US uniform to torture people. He really dropped the ball on that.

But perhaps he listened to the faux historians who claimed Ford "healed the nation" by pardoning Nixon.

Ford did not heal the nation. He gave us a placebo. He didn't lance the boil; he merely put a smiley-face bandage on it. It festered. It went septic. It was fed by the self-sustaining bacterial feedback loop of right-wing talk radio, right-wing hyperpartisan Republicans, evangelicals, and the centrality that ignoring physical reality was taking among conservatives. Hundreds of thousands died in Nicaragua, Iraq, and elsewhere around the world because of this.

For extended periods, people in other countries could only shake their heads in disbelief as a country that gave the world so much - the Apollo landings, jazz, rock, the ice cream cone, the Jedi knight - elected people who gave every appearance of being illiterate to head its government. The disbelief I encountered while travelling abroad during the GWB administration became downright disdain when TFG came to office. Many expressed sympathy, but many more just stayed away from me, as though I carried something contagious from the red-hatters who simply would not see reality.

I don't know that the prosecution of Richard Nixon would have solved all of our problems, but I am nonetheless firm in my opinion that we would have avoided many of the scandals that brought dishonor to this country.