Ford was a liberal Republican like Bill Moyers is a liberal Democrat. In fact, both of them recently teamed up with Jack Valenti to censor a JFK assassination documentary from the History channel. With liberalslike this, who needs the ones they kill?

    Ford served as a toadie for the FBI on the Warren Commission and for Richard Nixon in the secret deal for Nixon's pardon. He did nothing else of significance (although he did make a prescient remark about Poland in a debate with Jimmy Carter.) The Nixon pardon had no small significance, though. It put the political process in a permanent state of conspiracy.

    Americans never had resolution to Nixon's malfeasance, just as later they had none with the Iran-Contra crimes. The Iran-Contra perps now specialize in prolonging an agony in the Middle East that may never have a resolution as well.

    Before Ford, some notion of the bad guys getting a comeuppance because of checks and balances in the system at least remained as a popular idea. Ford crushed even that, and I for one do not mourn his passing.

    The bungling and banal "nice guy" image hype about Ford that the media plans to slap its audience with in the coming weeks is a legacy of falsity to anyone who truly remembers his public career.