Probably the Only Thing Dick Cheney and I Will Ever Agree On

With the death of President Ford it seems the nation is revisiting his pardon of Nixon. Many on the left link Bush's near absolute power in the bungling of Iraq, and there is a connection there. Those on the right like Cheney view the pardon as an act of national healing, a way to cleanse the national psyche. If that had occurred, we wouldn't be discussing it still today, but it was the right thing to do.

What Ford did was preserve the Presidency, if Nixon had gone on to do prison time it would have minimized the Presidency for decades. Quite possibly it wouldn't have regained its stature until September 11th, you could argue that it would have required an attack on such large proportions to bring the presidency back to relevancy. Whether or not that would have happened, the country would have been a quasi-parliamentary government for 25 plus years. Do you really think Denny Hastert would've been a better leader then Bush? Me neither.

What the left misses when it says that Ford beget Bush is this, if Ford had allowed Nixon to go through the legal system, if he had allowed the nation to accept that the Office of President could be convicted along with the man who had held it, then Bill Clinton would have surely been impeached and convicted. Once you've been down that road it is so much easier to go down it again, and there were plenty of Republicans who would have loved to see Clinton go down, to become the disgraced poster boy of all the thing the "Moral Majority" says we stand for in the Democratic Party. You think there favorite phrase is "Yeah but Clinton..." now, just imagine if they had removed him from office.

So while Cheney thanks Ford for allowing him and the President to expand the powers of the Executive Branch to an overwhelming degree, I thank him for preserving the relevancy of the Presidency, we'll undue the damage of Bush more quickly then we would've undone the damage of an irrelevant President.