Most people feel that your pardon of Richard Nixon was a good thing, allowing our nation to heal. At one time, I felt that way myself.
No more.
I now believe that Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon was the flashpoint for all of the problems we have now with the Republican "culture of corruption," and George W. Bush's flouting of our Constitution.
Carl Jung once stated that mental illness is the avoidance of necessary pain. The pardon of Richard Nixon allowed our nation to avoid the pain of a trial and conviction that would have truly proven that our system works: No man-not even the President-is above the law, and the American people are sovereign. Our nation has not been the same since Nixon's pardon.
President Ford's September 8, 1974 pardon of Richard M. Nixon prevented any real healing of the deep, national wound that was Watergate. It scabbed over, and eventually a thin sheath of skin covered the ulcer, without excision of the necrotic tissue underneath.
That necrotic tissue was the tentacles of fascistic corporatism; a corruption of the American soul in the name of profit, under the guise of National Security. This abomination has made our nation less secure, politically and economically, than at any time since the Great Depression, perhaps even the Civil War.
In the interest of full disclosure, I voted for Gerald Ford for President in 1976. Jimmy Carter's being a "born again" Christian scared the crap out of me. My personal experience with "born again" Christians had not been good. I despised their arrogant self-righteousness, their elitist attitudes, their blind unquestioning belief in Biblical literalism, and their willingness to fabricate facts to support their views.
Four years of Jimmy Carter's Presidency showed me that not all "born again" Christians were willfully ignorant, self-righteous, lying elitist bastards. The Camp David Accords and his forthright energy policy had won me over to Jimmy Carter's side. I did fear that his seeming failure with the Iran Hostage Crisis (together with the extreme measures he and Fed Chairman Paul Volcker had to take to end the "stagflation" that Carter had inherited from President Ford) would result in his defeat in the 1980 Presidential Election. Little did I dream that, despite my vote for Jimmy Carter in 1980, the beginnings of Iran-Contra, via the George H.W. Bush-William Casey engineered "October Surprise," would ensure President Carter's defeat.
Because President Ford had pardoned Nixon, men like George H.W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Casper Weinberger, and Oliver North assumed that the rules had changed. They could commit any dirty trick, undertake every politically corrupt practice, and ignore the Constitution, institutional custom, and every other moral restraint with impunity, as long as their party had a President in office to grant them a pardon if needed. The other "lesson" these jokers learned from Watergate was that it was the "betrayal" of President Nixon by men like John Dean that was the problem, not the illegal actions that had been committed by Richard Nixon and his cohorts. Loyalty to the President and their ideological brethren (in much the same way corporations demand loyalty to the corporation and its shareholders, and the Mafia demands omerta) replaced loyalty to the United States and its laws, as the highest standard of moral conduct.
We saw the first examples of this new understanding in the Iran-Contra scandal under Reagan in the 1980's. The laws of the United States were flouted to sell TOW antitank missiles and spare parts to the theocratic government of Iran, provide weapons and other covert aid to the right wing contras in Nicaragua, and use the trafficking of cocaine to fund additional illegal covert activities in Latin America and around the world.
The United States has had a long history of supporting corrupt, murderous dictators and plutocratic oligarchies throughout the Third World, exchanging support of a nation's wealthy elite for sweetheart deals on that country's exports, at the cost of the oppression and beggaring of the majority of that nation's citizens. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have been the publicly benign instruments of this oppression, with the CIA and the U.S. Military acting as contract enforcers and collection agents. These corporate shylocks and their government leg breakers make the disreputable symbiosis between Rome's tax farmers and its legions pale in comparison. (See John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit Man for more on this phenomenon.)
Marine Corps General Smedley Butler stated in 1935 that "War is a racket,"in the eponymous monograph he wrote after his retirement. Like those Roman legionaries twenty centuries earlier, Butler had served his country around the known world: from Haiti to China and Mexico to France; usually in support of American business interests. He twice won the Medal of Honor, and was responsible for beginning the development of the Marine Corps' close air support doctrine in China in the late 1920's. General Butler probably should have become the Commandant of the United States Marine Corps; but President Herbert Hoover disliked Butler, due to an incident between the two men dating back to the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.
General Butler would have agreed with President Harry Truman that war profiteering is a form of treason. He points out in War Is A Racket that the First World War created 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires in the United States. Thirty-five million pairs of the standard military hobnailed shoe (as General Butler described them, actually a low cut ankle boot if I remember correctly) were produced for an American military of fewer than five million service men. Twenty-five million pairs of those shoes were surplus at the end of the war.
Richard Girard is an increasingly radical representative of the disabled and disenfranchised members of America's downtrodden. His fondest desire is to be the one to arrest Bush and Cheney after they leave office in 2009.
Must Read (
Well Said (
News (
Touching (
Funny (
Supported (
Interesting (
Inspiring (
Valuable (
