Neither a Ford, nor a Lincoln -- just a lemon

I feel for those star reporters recalled from European vacations to cover the deaths of Saddam The Terrible, Chevy Chase's most immortal impersonation, and black America's greatest avatar. Flipping through the main cable channels this afternoon was an exercise in vertigo. Were Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Michael Jackson at Saddam's funeral? Why was Henry Kissinger bowing before James Brown's coffin?

Happily, I provoked only one argument with my parents this holiday weekend: I maintained that Gerard Ford, while an avuncular sort who looked splendid sporting a pipe, performed an act of unimaginable condescension to the American public in pardoning Richard Nixon. It's insulting that we had to be spared the horror of Watergate, as if we were nine year old children again, prevented by our moms from catching Children from the Corn. Timothy Noah delineates how Ford unwittingly created a situation in which later conflagrations of justice were allowed to flare, only to be dowsed by a properly administered presidential pardon -- like the one George H.W. Bush issued to Caspar Weinberger right before the 1992 elections. Besides, Noah argues, we're so enamoured of our former prez's (witness the Princess Di-esque outpouring of grief for a commander in chief every commentator has been at pains to point out was "one of the commen men") that Nixon would very likely have escaped prosecution anyway. Ask Teflon Will and Slick Ronnie. Or whatever their names are.

If you're feeling extra churlish, the catalogue of shame that Hitchens itemizes is enough to render Ford positively ghoulish. I knew about the Warren Commission, East Timor, and the Mayaguez, but was horrified to learn about the Kurdish rebellion against Saddamn in part funded by the U.S. that was abandoned at the last minute, thanks to the expediency of petrodollars -- only the first time the U.S. would betray the Kurds.