A SHORT HISTORY OF RIGHT WING DESTRUCTION PART 27

Now we come to the presidency of Gerald R. Ford, as white bread as any president we've had.  At first, Ford seemed a refreshing change from the paranoid and criminally-inclined Richard Nixon.  But mostly what we got during the brief Ford administration was an ineffectual government.

We had WIN buttons to combat inflation.  We had a swine flu vaccine that appears to have caused more harm than good.  We had Chevy Chase on "Saturday Night Live" doing pratfalls as a parody of Ford's perceived clumsiness.

The most significant event in the Ford presidency was the pardon of Richard Nixon, which came before Nixon was even charged or tried.  I don't know if there was a deal between Ford and Nixon, but you have to think it was part of the process in getting Nixon to resign the presidency.

Ford managed to get the Republican nomination for president in 1976 despite a challenge from the very right-wing Ronald Reagan, whose political star was on the ascendancy.  Then Ford committed a major gaffe in the presidential debates with Jimmy Carter when Ford made the astounding claim that the Poles did not consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union.

The Vietnam war came to its inglorious end.  I remember video footage of people trying to  grab on to helicopters leaving the U. S. Embassy in South Vietnam and seeing helicopters pushed over the sides of ships into the ocean.

More to come