Leslie King dies

We here at The Crackpot Times don't go much for "great man" history, preferring a more "bottom-up" reading of events and significant changes. That being said, President Gerald Ford's death gives us yet another look at just how huge a jerk our current president is. And we're not talking about the pardon, but the pardonee. Check out the end of Nixon's short statement after learning Ford pardon him:

No words can describe the depths of my regret and pain at the anguish my mistakes over Watergate have caused the nation and the presidency -- a nation I so deeply love and an institution I so greatly respect.

I know many fair-minded people believe that my motivations and action in the Watergate affair were intentionally self-serving and illegal. I now understand how my own mistakes and misjudgments have contributed to that belief and seemed to support it. This burden is the heaviest one of all to bear.

That the way I tried to deal with Watergate was the wrong way is a burden I shall bear for every day of the life that is left to me.

It definitely has the elements of the self-pity party that seems to be part of Nixon's own personal psychodrama. However, to publicly announce something like that just one month after resigning in disgrace, without a corresponding sense of entitled forgiveness so common in apologizes, takes some amount of courage. At the very least, the depth of difference between the end of Watergate and today says volumes about the kind of political culture we are living in. Back then the president was ashamed at being exposed as a criminal, and people were upset at the next president who was calling for forgiveness! Today the president brags about spying on Americans, needlessly invades and occupies foreign lands, and attempts to resurrect a pre-Magna Carter legal system, while the press wonders why those who have a problem with it hate this country

Let's compare Nixon's statement to another recent high point of political rhetoric:

I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I know the speculation. But I'm the decider, and I decide what is best.

That was from April 2006 and the very next sentence is: "And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense." This is how he explained his eventual decision to get rid of the guy he was decider-ing after saying essentially the same thing a week before:

THE PRESIDENT: Right. No, you and Hunt and Keil came in the Oval Office, and Hunt asked me the question one week before the campaign, and basically it was, are you going to do something about Rumsfeld and the Vice President? And my answer was, they're going to stay on. And the reason why is I didn't want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign. And so the only way to answer that question and to get you on to another question was to give you that answer.

Its a sad day when NIXON and FORD look like the men with integrity. You want to say it was another era, but then again, Cheney and Rumsfeld were there too...