Social media are full of interesting tidbits, factoids, a bit of propaganda and pithy commentary.
The item I posted here showed up over the weekend on my Facebook news feed. It’s been passed around a good bit.
It comes from someone who obviously supports Hillary Rodham Clinton’s bid to become the next president of the United States.
It calls for “perspective” from those who insist that Clinton is the worst politician in American history ever to vie for presidency.
The private e-mail server issue hasn’t played out fully. My guess is that might never play out sufficiently to suit every single critic who believes she endangered national security while serving as secretary of state; that she put lives at risk by sending out top-secret messages on her personal e-mail server.
Recent history, though, is full of examples of presidents lying to our faces.
* * *
I’ll take issue, though, with one of the items noted in this anonymous post. The purveyor of this item seems to think President Ford’s pardon of President Nixon was an act of evil. It wasn’t.
Richard Nixon was party to a serious constitutional crisis, the one known as “Watergate.” He paid a terrible political price, arriving at the doorstep of impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives before resigning his office on Aug. 9, 1974.
Gerald Ford took over and a month or so later, issued a blanket pardon. His reason? To spare the nation more political agony.
I was furious at the time. So were many Americans. I wanted the former president to pay even more for what he did while at the nation’s helm. The cover-up, how he sicced the feds against his “enemies,” how he ordered the FBI to look the other way in investigating the break-in at the Democratic National Committee office.
Ford’s pardon of Nixon likely cost the president a chance at being elected in 1976.
It turned out, though, to be an act of courage.
Many years later, the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston bestowed its “Profile in Courage” award to President Ford for that decision. The late Sen. Ted Kennedy, speaking on behalf of his family, acknowledged in public remarks that he, too, was wrong to criticize the president for making that decision, but that he came to realize he did the right thing.
The rest of the items noted in the brief missive attached to this blog post? Yep. I agree with ’em.
Time for some perspective, folks.
Yes, some rational perspective would be useful. I’m more a Donald Trump despiser than a Hillary Clinton supporter, but though Clinton’s private server setup was a dumb move, I highly doubt she was using it to feed state secrets to the Russkies. I am similarly skeptical about Trump’s repeated and clarified claim that Clinton and President Obama created ISIS (a common myth propagated among anti-U.S. Russian nationalists). When Trump was questioned for a third time about this preposterous assertion, he did a pathetic back-pedal, but this particular mountain of stupid was too vast to comb over.
What does it say about the state of our body politic that this unqualified ignoramus made it to and through a presidential primary? It pisses me off no end that the space being wasted on Trump is, in several alternate universes, occupied by a worthy, viable Republican candidate.
Early in the primaries, I was impressed by Ohio Gov. Kasich, so much that if he was running against Clinton, I likely would be backing a Republican presidential candidate for the first time in my life. Alas, Trump’s gale-force blast of blowhardy bombast leveled all GOP contenders, righteous and unrighteous.
I don’t believe Trump supporters (or even Trump himself) were ever really serious about his ample butt being planted in the Oval Office. Since their disingenuous dalliance with the devil has made an H. Clinton administration all but inevitable, if I hear any of them bitching about it, I’m going to crawl back into my gooey Matrix pod and go to sleep.