Gerald Ford RIP.

[T Park]

Just heard on the radio Gerald Ford has passed on.

A great american.

A sad day.

[AFE7FATMAN]

Pardon?

[PixelPusher]

Pardon?
I was sorely tempted to use that joke.

[ChumpDumper]

He was the right guy at the right time. We were lucky Agnew was forced out of office the year before.

[boutons_]

"college sports forum"

I remember the joke about GF back in the 70s, that he had played way too many football games in college without a helmet. :lol

[johnsmith]

"college sports forum"

I remember the joke about GF back in the 70s, that he had played way too many football games in college without a helmet. :lol


Yeah, what an idiot......all he accomplished was becoming the President of the United States. Unlike Boutons who will be forever remembered around the globe for all his contributions given to Spurstalk.com. :rolleyes

[sandman]

He was the right guy at the right time. We were lucky Agnew was forced out of office the year before.

Absolutely. He did an admirable job managing the goat rodeo he inherited. I shudder to think what Agnew would have done.

I still find it amazing that he wasn't even the Veep on the party ticket, yet ended up POTUS when it was all said and done. Wonder if he was the only POTUS who didn't use his birth name?

[ChumpDumper]

All of MSNBC's shows are honoring Ford and reviewing his legacy very thoroghly.

Fox News is showing a rerun of O'Reilly and Barney Frank bitching over an interview transcript.

God bless America.

[PixelPusher]

All of MSNBC's shows are honoring Ford and reviewing his legacy very thoroghly.

Fox News is showing a rerun of O'Reilly and Barney Frank bitching over an interview transcript.

God bless America.

Fox News ran all of their canned Gerald Ford retrospectives all through the night last night. To be fair, I'm pretty sure ALL the networks had canned Ford eulogies ready to go once the news broke late last night.

[ChumpDumper]

I'd rather see those rerun than O'Reilly.

[boutons_]

Ford kicks dubya/dickhead/neo-cons/rubber-stamp-Repubs from the grave.

As any decent, serious man would have done, Ford said he wouldn't have invaded Iraq. It's the world's catastrophe that the dubya and dickhead aren't either serious or decent.

===========

Ford Disagreed With Bush About Invading Iraq

By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 28, 2006; A01

Former president Gerald R. Ford said in an embargoed interview in July 2004 that the Iraq war was not justified. "I don't think I would have gone to war," he said a little more than a year after President Bush launched the invasion advocated and carried out by prominent veterans of Ford's own administration.

In a four-hour conversation at his house in Beaver Creek, Colo., Ford "very strongly" disagreed with the current president's justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously. In the tape-recorded interview, Ford was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney -- Ford's White House chief of staff -- and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as Ford's chief of staff and then his Pentagon chief.

"Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction," Ford said. "And now, I've never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do."

In a conversation that veered between the current realities of a war in the Middle East and the old complexities of the war in Vietnam whose bitter end he presided over as president, Ford took issue with the notion of the United States entering a conflict in service of the idea of spreading democracy.

"Well, I can understand the theory of wanting to free people," Ford said, referring to Bush's assertion that the United States has a "duty to free people." But the former president said he was skeptical "whether you can detach that from the obligation number one, of what's in our national interest." He added: "And I just don't think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security."

The Ford interview -- and a subsequent lengthy conversation in 2005 -- took place for a future book project, though he said his comments could be published at any time after his death. In the sessions, Ford fondly recalled his close working relationship with key Bush advisers Cheney and Rumsfeld while expressing concern about the policies they pursued in more recent years.

"He was an excellent chief of staff. First class," Ford said. "But I think Cheney has become much more pugnacious" as vice president. He said he agreed with former secretary of state Colin L. Powell's assertion that Cheney developed a "fever" about the threat of terrorism and Iraq. "I think that's probably true."

( dearth dickhead, The Feveishly Deranged dark evil puppet-meister behind the the wooden-headed dubya. mua ha ha ! mua ha ha ! )

Describing his own preferred policy toward Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Ford said he would not have gone to war, based on the publicly available information at the time, and would have worked harder to find an alternative. "I don't think, if I had been president, on the basis of the facts as I saw them publicly," he said, "I don't think I would have ordered the Iraq war. I would have maximized our effort through sanctions, through restrictions, whatever, to find another answer."

( YV's retort: "sanctions, restrictions, diplomacy weren't working well, but a fucking war, now that's working a much better" )

Ford had faced his own military crisis -- not a war he started like Bush, but one he had to figure out how to end. In many ways those decisions framed his short presidency -- in the difficult calculations about how to pull out of Vietnam and the challenging players who shaped policy on the war. Most challenging of all, as Ford recalled, was Henry A. Kissinger, who was both secretary of state and national security adviser and had what Ford said was "the thinnest skin of any public figure I ever knew."

"I think he was a super secretary of state," Ford said, "but Henry in his mind never made a mistake, so whatever policies there were that he implemented, in retrospect he would defend."

In 1975, Ford decided to relieve Kissinger of his national security title. "Why Nixon gave Henry both secretary of state and head of the NSC, I never understood," Ford said. "Except he was a great supporter of Kissinger. Period." But Ford viewed Kissinger's dual roles as a conflict of interest that weakened the administration's ability to fully air policy debates. "They were supposed to check on one another."

That same year, Ford also decided to fire Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger and replace him with Rumsfeld, who was then Ford's White House chief of staff. Ford recalled that he then used that decision to go to Kissinger and say, "I'm making a change at the secretary of defense, and I expect you to be a team player and work with me on this" by giving up the post of security adviser.

Kissinger was not happy. "Mr. President, the press will misunderstand this," Ford recalled Kissinger telling him. "They'll write that I'm being demoted by taking away half of my job." But Ford made the changes, elevating the deputy national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, to take Kissinger's White House post.

Throughout this maneuvering, Ford said, he kept his White House chief of staff in the dark. "I didn't consult with Rumsfeld. And knowing Don, he probably resented the fact that I didn't get his advice, which I didn't," Ford said. "I made the decision on my own."

Kissinger remained a challenge for Ford. He regularly threatened to resign, the former president recalled. "Over the weekend, any one of 50 weekends, the press would be all over him, giving him unshirted hell. Monday morning he would come in and say, 'I'm offering my resignation.' Just between Henry and me. And I would literally hold his hand. 'Now, Henry, you've got the nation's future in your hands and you can't leave us now.' Henry publicly was a gruff, hard-nosed, German-born diplomat, but he had the thinnest skin of any public figure I ever knew."

Ford added, "Any criticism in the press drove him crazy." Kissinger would come in and say: "I've got to resign. I can't stand this kind of unfair criticism." Such threats were routine, Ford said. "I often thought, maybe I should say: 'Okay, Henry. Goodbye,' " Ford said, laughing. "But I never got around to that."

At one point, Ford recalled Kissinger, his chief Vietnam policymaker, as "coy." Then he added, Kissinger is a "wonderful person. Dear friend. First-class secretary of state. But Henry always protected his own flanks."

Ford was also critical of his own actions during the interviews. He recalled, for example, his unsuccessful 1976 campaign to remain in office, when he was under enormous pressure to dump Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller from the Republican ticket. Some polls at the time showed that up to 25 percent of Republicans, especially those from the South, would not vote for Ford if Rockefeller, a New Yorker from the liberal wing of the Republican Party, was on the ticket.

When Rockefeller offered to be dropped from the ticket, Ford took him up on it. But he later regretted it. The decision to dump the loyal Rockefeller, he said, was "an act of cowardice on my part."

In the end, though, it was Vietnam and the legacy of the retreat he presided over that troubled Ford. After Saigon fell in 1975 and the United States evacuated from Vietnam, Ford was often labeled the only American president to lose a war. The label always rankled.

"Well," he said, "I was mad as hell, to be honest with you, but I never publicly admitted it."

Christine Parthemore contributed to this report.

====================

Gerry, dubya and dickhead will remove that epithet, as dubya becomes the second US president to lose a war. Even better, dubya's going to lose a war HE started, while you lost a war started a decade earlier.

[BIG IRISH]

Yep
We can thank Mr Ford for:
Supreme Court Judge: Justice Stevens,and if you like him you can thank

Donald Rumsfeld :rolleyes
WASHINGTON - If you were born in 1974, the year that Gerald Ford took office as America’s first unelected president, his time in the White House isn't even a memory to you.

Remember the Mayaguez? That was the American merchant ship captured by the Cambodian navy, prompting Ford to order an attack to retake it.

How about Sara Jane Moore? She was the woman who fired a shot from her .38-caliber revolver at the president in 1975 as he was leaving the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, missing him by five feet.

And do you remember Ford being the first president ever to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, where he got rough treatment from Democrats over his pardon of his disgraced predecessor, Richard Nixon?

None of that matters much now, except to historians.

A lasting effect
But one thing Ford did is making a profound difference in the lives of Americans living today. Measured by its lasting impact, Ford’s most significant act as president was appointing John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court.

Next week will mark the 31st anniversary of Stevens’ taking his oath as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. Stevens has turned out to be one of the stalwart members of the court's liberal wing.

Thirty years after Ford left office, Americans are living under legal rules created by the Supreme Court, in many cases by 5-to-4 decisions with Stevens in the majority.

Among them:

Stevens wrote the majority opinion in Kelo v. New London, the 2005 decision that held that local and state governments could condemn and acquire private property even when it was not to be used for a public purpose.


He helped form the five-justice majority in another 2005 case, Roper v. Simmons, which held that convicted murderers who’d been under age 18 when they committed their crime could not get the death penalty.


He joined a 2000 decision called Stenberg v. Carhart in which the court struck down a Nebraska law banning so-called “partial-birth” abortions.
....
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16230460/

Ford's touch as a mentor is part of legacy as leader :rolleyes


WASHINGTON — .... nation's 38th president, who will lie in state this weekend in the U.S. Capitol where he served most of his political career, left a less heralded but far more enduring legacy in the form of the people he attracted to public service.

Many whose careers Ford launched or nurtured are still in government and shaping policy today.

Vice President Cheney, a former colleague from the U.S. House, served as White House chief of staff to Ford.


Recently retired Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld was another congressional colleague who served as Defense secretary for Ford, and his chief of staff.

In Congress, Rumsfeld had managed the campaign that resulted in Ford ousting the more conservative Charles Halleck of Indiana as House Republican leader in 1965.

Ford launched James Baker on a career that would see him serve as an adviser to three presidents. Baker, an undersecretary of Commerce in Ford's administration, later became later secretary of Treasury for Ronald Reagan and secretary of State for George H.W. Bush. Now, he's advising the current president on Iraq. :rolleyes

Another Ford find: Alan Greenspan, who retired this year after 18 years as chairman of the Federal Reserve. "Ford really brought Alan into government," said Kay Bailey Hutchison, a friend of both men.


The fact that Ford alumni include Cheney and Rumsfeld, now viewed as arch-conservatives, as well as Stevens, one of the court's most liberal members, speaks volumes about the former president, according to those who knew him.

"That's Jerry Ford," said former senator Alan Simpson, a friend of nearly 50 years. "He has a big wingspan. There are a lot of people who fly under the spread of that eagle."

It was Ford who, as Republican House leader, urged George H.W. Bush to run for Congress. :rolleyes

Later, as president, he appointed him head the CIA. "I owe much of my life in politics to Jerry Ford," Bush, the father of the current president, said Wednesday. "He campaigned for me in '66, and I won. Then he gave me the great assignment of being equivalent of ambassador in China."

Two relatively junior Ford appointees, Paul O'Neill and John Snow, both served as Treasury secretary for the current president.

Ford's influence spanned generations. Hutchison, who now holds a Senate GOP leadership position, says Ford was a trailblazer when it came to promoting the careers of women. "He gave me my first real major federal appointment," said the senator, who served as vice chair of the National Transportation Safety Board under Ford.

Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., said Ford, the Republican House leader, took an interest in him when Lott was working for Rep. William Colmer, D-Miss.

When Colmer died in office in 1980, Ford called Lott and urged him to run to succeed his boss — as a Republican. He also sent him a campaign contribution. :rolleyes

Former Defense secretary Melvin Laird, another former House colleague and longtime Ford friend, was with him the night Ford learned that he would become president

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-12-27-ford-legacy-cover_x.htm

Reserve comments about the above individuals and the man that mentored
them out of respect for the dead.

[ChumpDumper]

Are you seriously trying to kick Ford's corpse for hiring George H. W. Bush, Alan Greenspan, James Baker and Paul O'Neil?

That's pathetic.

John Paul Stevens would be the one guy conservatives could bitch about, but the Republican party back then was so much more liberal than it was back then you douchebags wouldn't recognize it.

Rummy was always a dick but he was never given free rein to dictate policy as he was with Bushie. Even Cheney was a moderate consensus builder until 9/11 turned him into a wild-eyed neocon face-shooter. Consider his decisions when they were made over thirty years ago; they weren't that bad at all.

[BIG IRISH]

Chump
Ford was weak in Foreign Policy. The White House was in turmoil between
Sec of State Kissinger and Donald & Dick D&D finally won and Anti-Detente
won and the cold war continued.

Go back and look at the Economy under Ford. Remember the WIN Buttons?

Don't forget his contribution to the Warren Report.

What he said about eastern Europe was just about the most stupid thing ever said by a President, Current President excluded.


What about the impeachment drive agains Douglas?
And the Pardon. I think 60% of american's wanted RMH to go to jail and I think
America was strong enough to stand a long drawn out trial.

He had the ability to go along to get along and Washington misses that today.

[ChumpDumper]

Don't you get it?

Foreign relations was the last thing any US president needed to be involved in at that time. Detente was the best course of action after the Vietnam debacle.
Don't forget his contribution to the Warren Report.WTF does that mean? He was on the commission. He questioned 60+ witnesses. Are you a conspiracy nut that says he covered something up?
What about the impeachment drive agains Douglas?Misguided.
And the Pardon. I think 60% of american's wanted RMH to go to jail and I think
America was strong enough to stand a long drawn out trial.Pretty much everyone disagrees with you now.
He had the ability to go along to get along and Washington misses that today.He had the ability to try to work in a bipartisan manner and veto 66 bills when he thought it necessary. He was far fom perfect and there was no way anything he did was going to get him a second term, but the major actions of his presidency and the tone of policies were what the nation needed after LBJ and Nixon turned everything to shit.

[xrayzebra]

Well not everyone will be at the funeral.


Yahoo! News
Reid to miss Ford funeral

By DENNIS CONRAD, Associated Press WriterThu Dec 28, 12:08 AM ET

Incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will miss the state funeral for former President Gerald Ford at the Capitol Rotunda on Saturday night, opting instead to lead a delegation to South America with an expected stop at the Machu Picchu Inca ruins.

Reid, D-Nev., left Wednesday afternoon from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland with a bipartisan group of five other senators, including Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the incoming assistant majority leader, for what has been described as a weeklong visit to Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru.

The highlight of the trip is said to be separate meetings with the presidents of the three nations, with the last one scheduled in Peru on Tuesday afternoon.

"They would be difficult to cancel," Reid spokesman Jim Manley said via mobile phone as the congressional delegation took off in a U.S. military plane.

The senators are also scheduled to be in Cuzco, Peru, on Sunday, which would give them an opportunity to view the nearby Inca ruins and anything else in advance of New Year's Eve.

Manley said the senators opted to skip Ford-related ceremonies over the next few days because of the long-scheduled meetings with the South American presidents, noting that U.S. relations with some of the countries are in need of improvement.

Manley did not rule out the possibility that the delegation might return to Washington for at least one Ford-related event, perhaps a church service Tuesday morning. But their meeting with Peru's president, scheduled for the afternoon, could interfere with that, he said.

"Senator Reid has tried to reach Mrs. Ford," Manley said, adding that the senator had not received a return call from her before the delegation had departed for South America. Manley later added that Reid had called the former first lady to express condolences, and also to explain why the delegation might not make it back to Washington for the funeral.

Durbin's office released a statement before he left, calling Ford, who died Tuesday at age 93, "a man of principle, integrity and honesty who helped heal the nation during some of our darkest times." He offered his "deepest condolences" to the Ford family.

Other senators making the trip are Kent Conrad, D-N.D., Judd Gregg, R-N.H., Robert Bennett, R-Utah, and Ken Salazar, D-Colo.

Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.


Obviously, Reid and the U.S. Senate are now in charge of foreign affairs in
Washington, since they are going to take care of our bad relationships with
other governments. No conceit in Washington, right?

[boutons_]

Typical and telling that the radical right rabble trash GF because he was too decent, civil, serious, moderate for their bomb-throwing tastes, while sucking off to the very end lying, murderous extreme ideological bastards like dubya and dickhead.

It's also telling about the USA in general that an extreme mediocrity like GF is being idolized and feted in death mainly because he was that extreme rarity of a politician who was decent and civil.

[johnsmith]

Typical and telling that the radical right rabble trash GF because he was too decent, civil, serious, moderate for their bomb-throwing tastes, while sucking off to the very end lying, murderous extreme ideological bastards like dubya and dickhead.

It's also telling about the USA in general that an extreme mediocrity like GF is being idolized and feted in death mainly because he was that extreme rarity of a politician who was decent and civil.


You should move.

[xrayzebra]

^^He does, on a regular basis, from his mouth. It is called Bull Shit. The only
movement he will ever know.

[gameFACE]

RIP, Mr Ford.

http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/presidents/gerald-ford/gerald_ford_tamale_shrunk.jpg

May you enjoy plenty of shuck-less tamales in Heaven...................

[BIG IRISH]

Don't you get it?

Foreign relations was the last thing any US president needed to be involved in at that time. Wrong the doors to China had been opened [/I]
but in the debate with Carter he proved he din't know anything about
Foreign affairs.
Detente was the best course of action after the Vietnam debacle.




WTF does that mean? He was on the commission. He questioned 60+ witnesses. Are you a conspiracy nut that says he covered something up?

Why were the files sealed for 75 years? If you believe the Warren Report
I have Ocean front property in Arizona.


Misguided.Vindictive

Pretty much everyone disagrees with you now.He had the ability to try to work in a bipartisan manner and veto 66 bills when he thought it necessary.

:p: most of which were overturn, I understand
Ford told The Washington Post last year that his long personal friendship with Nixon played a role in his decision to issue the pardon for Watergate wrongdoing.

"I looked upon him as my personal friend. And I always treasured our relationship. And I had no hesitancy about granting the pardon, because I felt that we had this relationship and that I didn't want to see my real friend have the stigma," Ford told Post reporter Bob Woodward.

[B]Ford had asked that his remarks not be released until after his death. :rolleyes
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/F/FORD_PREDECESSOR_QUIPS?SITE=FLTAM&SECTION=US
Woodward also stated in a book that although a Pardon was never discussed Ford promised Nixon he would not be proscuted for any crimes.


He was far fom perfect and there was no way anything he did was going to get him a second term, but the major actions of his presidency and the tone of policies were what the nation needed after LBJ and Nixon turned everything to shit.

He might just have gotten a 2nd term if he had not
1. Given the Pardon
2. Dropped Rockey from the Ticket
3. Screwed up in the debate with Carter

[Nbadan]

I've never trusted anyone again who was on the Warren Commission. That's you too Arlen Spector.

[ChumpDumper]

Please tell me your Kennedy assassination theories, gentlemen. This should be good.

[Nbadan]

That's a topic for another day.....why did Ford hate the U.S.?

By Bob Woodward
Washington Post
December 28, 2006
Page A01


Former president Gerald R. Ford said in an embargoed interview in July 2004 that the Iraq war was not justified. "I don't think I would have gone to war," he said a little more than a year after President Bush had launched the invasion advocated and carried out by prominent veteran's of Ford's own administration.

In a four-hour conversation at his house in Beaver Creek, Colo., Ford "very strongly" disagreed with the current president's justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously. In the tape-recorded interview, Ford was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney --Ford's White House chief of staff -- and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as Ford's chief of staff and then his Pentagon chief.

"Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction," Ford said. "And now, I've never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do."

ABC played tape this am of Ford said he didn't want it released until his death

[BIG IRISH]

I've never trusted anyone again who was on the Warren Commission. That's you too Arlen Spector.
:clap

[mikejones99]

More people need to get buried in michigan, at least 100 piston fans need to join that fool in the ground.