President Ford is Dead

It's official. Gerald Ford is dead. I know, because Larry King is interviewing him. Also, his body is lying in state about a block away. There are more cars and people on the street than would be expected just after midnight on a Sunday, but nothing like the throngs that flowed through the streets to view Reagan's casket. Despite being the President who brought the country back together after Watergate (an overblown event if I've ever seen one), Ford will always be known as the President who pardoned Nixon. Liberals will always hate him because he snatched red meat from the jaws of the sharks, who were in a feeding frenzy. Looking back on Nixon's presidency, you'd think he'd be a liberal's dream. Many liberals would be dead or Canadian today had Nixon not frozen deployments to Vietnam after he took office. Nixon also extricated us from Southeast Asia. True, the Paris Accords failed (because communists can NEVER be trusted to keep their word), this country lost its honor and credibility and millions of Southeast Asians were murdered or imprisoned in insane asylums or re-education camps. But when have liberals ever worried about honor, integrity or the suffering of Asians? Nixon left America in a far stronger geopolitical position thanks to his strategic alignment with China, which completed the encirclement of the Soviet Union and forced Moscow to deploy millions of troops on its eastern front as it faced NATO in the West. The opening to China also ensured that after the Soviet Union collapsed, the result would not be new hot and cold wars in the Asia/Pacific, but regional stability and prosperity. Under Nixon, Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, including welfare and affirmative action, reached its fullest extent. He was willing to give Democrats domestic victories so long as they left his foreign policy alone. The Justice Department carried out Court-ordered integration of schools and labor unions in the North. The Office of Economic Opportunity was founded, along with the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Eighteen-year-olds got the vote and military conscription was abolished. The Supreme Court struck down state laws banning abortion. The federal government imposed wage and price controls to combat inflation. Not least, it was Nixon who pulled the dollar off the gold standard established at Bretton Woods in 1944. Nixon should have been a darling of the left, but liberals hated him with a burning passion because he was a devout Cold Warrior. He was committed to bringing down the Soviet Union and laid the groundwork for its collapse under Reagan. For that, liberals hated him. Watergate was not that big a deal. Democratic presidents had pulled many worse dirty tricks in their time. But liberals seized on it to bring Nixon down. Liberals are not only haters, they are generational haters. They aren't satisfied to hold on to grudges for decades, they teach their children to hate Republicans the way white supremacists teach their offspring to hate blacks and Muslims teach their kids to hate Jews. Many of the Nixon-haters were not even born when he was in office. They simply hate him because they were told to. Ask them why they hate Nixon and they will respond with some vague gibberish about Whitewater 'scuse me, Watergate and "shredding the Constitution." But nobody has ever accused liberals -- especially young liberals -- of thinking for themselves.