Ford had it right on Nixon pardon

A friend posed this question on Facebook in response to my blog post on the 40th anniversary of President Nixon’s resignation.

He asked about my thoughts relating to President Ford’s pardon of Nixon barely a month after taking office on Aug. 9, 1974.

Here it is: President Ford did the right thing.

I’ll add that at the time I didn’t agree with the decision to grant a full and complete pardon. I was barely 25 years old at the time and I suppose I wanted my pound of flesh from the former president. Nixon, after all, had clobbered Sen. George McGovern in the 1972 election, dashing my hopes after working for McGovern in Multnomah County, Ore., and after casting my first-ever vote in a presidential election.

That was then.

Time, as they say, has this way of tempering one’s anger.

It has done so with me.

I grew to respect Gerald Ford immensely over the years. I now understand why he did what he did so early in his presidency. He did it to spare the nation the heartache of a possible trial for crimes that President Nixon committed against the nation, the Constitution and, yes, rank-and-file Americans.

I wasn’t alone in looking critically at the president’s decision to pardon his immediate predecessor. Nor am I alone in recognizing President Ford’s decision.

Not too many years before his death, President Ford received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award granted annually by the JFK Library and Museum in Boston. The man who presented the award to the former president was one of his harshest critics at the time of the pardon: the late Sen. Ted Kennedy.

Kennedy turned to Ford and said, in effect: “Mr. President, I was wrong to criticize that decision.”

The president did perform a courageous political act. It well might have cost him his election to the presidency in 1976.

It was the right thing to do.

Nixon quit, saved the country

Why not put a positive spin on what at the time seemed to many Americans like a dark moment in U.S. history?

Forty years today, President Richard Nixon announced his resignation from office.

How is that a positive development? He saved the country from certain impeachment.

http://www.politico.com/playbook/?hp=l6

Still, I saw a poll the other day that suggests that more than half of Americans today see the Watergate scandal as just an example of politics as usual.

Those of us who remember that time recall something quite different. President Nixon committed egregious crimes against the Constitution, such as when he ordered federal spooks to cease and desist in their probe of that June 1972 burglary of the Democratic National Committee office at the Watergate building.

He lied to the country. He sought to cover up an event described early on as a “third-rate burglary.” Nixon sought to bring the power of his office to bear while hiding what happened.

If that isn’t abuse of power, then the term has no meaning at all.

I was a newly married college student when the crap hit the fan in 1973-74. I didn’t want the country to go forward with impeachment. Americans knew the stakes. But when the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment, it became clear to the president he was toast.

He quit his office. In the process the 37th president well might have helped rescue the nation from untold grief.

Time passes. Attitudes have changed, I suppose. The poll I saw, however, must not mean Americans have relegated a serious constitutional crisis to what they now see as just another game of political hardball.

It was a whole lot worse than that.

Obama is doing his job

John Boehner cracks me up.

The speaker of the House admonishes the president of the United States to do hi job, then sues him for … um … doing his job.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/08/do-your-job-mr-president-109840.html?hp=l3#.U-TcCVJ0yt8

What gives with this guy?

A lawsuit is likely to be filed in court that seeks to punish President Obama for taking executive action on the Affordable Care Act. Now he wants the president to act on immigration and to do something about the refugee crisis on our nation’s southern border.

I’m baffled by the mixed message.

Obama says he’s been doing his job because won’t do its job. Congress is fighting back, accusing the president of overstepping his constitutional authority.

Dysfunction reigns supreme in Washington, D.C.

It doesn’t matter any longer who’s at fault. The system just needs an overhaul.

Air strikes 'authorized'

Here we go once more.

The commander in chief “authorizes” the use of military force but leaves the door open to possibly not actually using it.

http://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2014/08/07/obama_authorizes_renewed_airstrikes_in_iraq_107354.html

The enemy this time is in Iraq, the Sunni Muslim extremists seeking to overthrow the Shiite government. President Obama today announced a humanitarian mission to help those who are stranded in northern Iraq by the onslaught of the Sunni fighters.

What’s next? The president said he has “authorized” the launching of targeted air strikes against those who would threaten a small detachment of U.S. forces sent to protect American consulate officials in Irbil.

A part of me wants the president to make good on the threat. However, a bigger part of me hopes the Iraqi government can push the insurgents back, defeat them on the battlefield and forgo the use of U.S. military might in a conflict our ground forces ended more than a year ago.

As RealClearPolitics.com reported: “‘As commander in chief, I will not allow the United States to be dragged into fighting another war in Iraq,’ Obama said.

“Even so, he outlined a rationale for airstrikes if the Islamic State militants advance on American troops in the northern city of Irbil and the U.S. consulate there in the Kurdish region of Iraq. The troops were sent to Iraq earlier this year as part of the White House response to the extremist group’s swift movement across the border with Syria and into Iraq.”

No one should want the United States to re-enter the fight in Iraq. However, the United States, with its investment in lives and money already deposited in Iraq, needs to protect its interests in that country.

If air strikes are needed, then we must not be reluctant to exert our considerable force.

Turn out the lights

Paul Burka is right.

The Texas governor’s race is over. Done. Finis. History. Pfft.

http://www.texasmonthly.com/burka-blog/what-governors-race

Democratic state Sen. Wendy Davis had a chance to make a fight of it. She’s choked.

Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott is the heavy favorite anyway. Davis, as Burka noted, had a chance to knock the AG off track over secrecy of dangerous chemicals. Then she failed to capitalize.

I’ve noted already that the Democrats’ greatest chance to make inroads is in the race for lieutenant governor. State Sen. Leticia Van de Putte is a potentially much stronger candidate than Davis is for governor. What’s more, state Sen. Dan Patrick, the bombastic and fiery GOP nominee for light gov, is much more prone to self-destruction than the cautious and circumspect Abbott.

I was hoping Davis could make a race of it. With just three months to go before the November election, it now appears that Davis is going to get mugged by her Republican opponent.

For those of us who wish for a more competitive field at the top of the state election ballot, well … that’s too bad.

Sen. Cheater drops out

Sen. John Walsh has dropped out of his race to be elected to the seat to which he was appointed.

Good bye, senator.

http://news.msn.com/us/sen-walsh-drops-out-of-race-amid-plagiarism-probe

Walsh, D-Mont., was running for election and faced an uphill fight to keep a seat in a Republican state that is trending more GOP than ever this year. He faced long odds.

Then it was revealed that the guy plagiarized large sections of his master’s thesis at the Army War College. Walsh at first said he “inadvertently” lifted some passages from other people’s work, which is a serious no-no on its face. Then he admitted more or less to what the Washington Post uncovered, which was that large sections of copy came directly from other writings — and were added to his thesis without attribution.

Walsh then blamed the plagiarism on post-traumatic stress disorder, which to my mind is more than a bit of a stretch.

To borrow Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s infamous quip: Oops.

Walsh was facing intense criticism in Montana. His fellow Democrats ran for the tall grass.

What he did, of course, didn’t involve the standard scandal stuff of sexual immorality or theft of money. Instead, it involved lack of character and honesty.

Most of us understand that public officials aren’t perfect. But some of us — including me — expect them to be closer to perfection than the average Joe.

Sen. Walsh has been revealed to be untrustworthy, given that he based much of his campaign on his military record, which implicitly includes his academic credentials.

Now those credentials are known to be fraudulent. The next step should be for the War College to pull back his master’s degree.

Cease-fire holds … now what?

They’ve stopped the shelling in Gaza, for now.

So might there be a more permanent solution on the horizon? No one’s counting on that just yet.

http://thehill.com/policy/international/214551-obama-i-have-no-sympathy-for-hamas

President Obama made it quite clear Wednesday that the United States stands firmly behind Israel’s right to defend itself against the aggression launched by the hated terror group Hamas. He is right, of course.

The United States must stand foursquare with its primary ally in the Middle East and it must be fully aware — always — of Israel’s belief that the countries that surround it are not be trusted completely.

Hamas, let us remember, is nothing more than a terrorist cabal that started this fight with Israel by launching rockets into Israeli neighborhoods. Israel responded with extreme force. Yes, civilians have died and all civilized people mourn the deaths of innocent people.

Who’s responsible for that? Hamas.

Obama also is clear that any permanent peace must rely on Palestinian Authority involvement. The trouble with the PA, though, is that it has aligned itself with Hamas. It has included Hamas in a form of “unity government,” which enrages Israel — and understandably so.

So, the shooting has stopped for the time being.

My hope is that the voices talking to each other can be heard while the explosive noise remains silent.

Gov. Perry overreaching?

Texas lawmakers think Gov. Rick Perry might be overreaching his own self with regard to the planned deployment of National Guard forces to protect Texans against the influx of … children.

Seems that the governor is using his executive authority to spend $75 million in public money for this deployment, which some lawmakers think is an overreach.

Some lawmakers question Perry’s border funding move UPDATE

Interesting, eh?

I don’t know enough about the details of what kind of power the governor has in these matters, but it does intrigue me that this governor, who’s been so critical of federal overreach by the White House might be getting into a bit of a jam at home over the very same issue.

“The Legislative Budget Board has authority to move money around the budget in between legislative sessions. Perry, however, bypassed formal board action to free $38 million to pay for the Guard in the early stages of its deployment and to help fund a DPS border surge,” the San Antonio Express-News reported in its blog.

State Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, says the deployment doesn’t make sense in the first place.

He’s right. It doesn’t. The Guard can do little to stop the flow of children fleeing Central America.

The lame-duck governor, though, says he’s doing it for symbolic reasons.

Whatever. It now might against state law for him to just spend the money willy-nilly.

The irony is fairly rich, don’t you think?

 

R.I.P., James Brady

The New York Times article attached to this blog post commemorates James Brady for what he was: an advocate for gun control and a friend of those who sought to curb the gun violence that struck him down.

He was all of that.

Brady, who died Monday at age 73, was grievously wounded in the March 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan. He was hit in the head by a bullet fired by John Hinckley, suffering paralysis, speech loss and short-term memory loss.

As the president’s press secretary, he was standing just a few feet from the president when Hinckley opened fire.

But what likely won’t be told in the days in the ahead about James Brady was that in the brief time he served as press spokesman for the White House — Reagan had taken office just three months prior to being wounded in the shooting — is that Brady had enormous respect among the men and women who covered the president.

Brady was known as a straight-arrow. He understood his “clientele,” the hard-core press hounds who could sniff out BS when it presented itself. He didn’t get them any baloney. From what I’ve heard over the years from those who covered the White House, the folks in the press room really took an instant liking to Brady.

Compare that with the testiness in White House-press relations that has emerged before and since Brady’s brief stint at the press room microphone.

His real legacy, certainly, will be that of a passionate advocate for gun control. Whether one agrees or disagrees with his view, James Brady came by it honestly. He took a bullet in the brain and paid a terrible price while serving the nation.

His national service, while too short, was stellar.

First impressions count for motorists

BOISE, Idaho — First impressions count for motorists tooling through a city.

We blazed through Idaho’s capital city in our Prius and noticed something I wish our highway builders in Amarillo would grasp. The city of Boise and the Idaho transportation department have done a marvelous job of dressing up highway interchanges.

Do you hear me, Texas Department of Transportation? Your colleagues in Idaho have done something you seem unable to do.

Interstate 84, the main east-west thoroughfare through Boise is decked out in native Idaho wildflowers. I cannot identify them for you. I’ll just say they are gorgeous. The arrangements on the interchanges are attractive. They leave motorists just passing through — such as my wife and me — with good thoughts.

The Interstate 40/27 interchange in Amarillo is a mess. There’s no other way to describe it. The only thing TxDOT did correctly with the highway was to paint the concrete in colors that approximate the hues seen in Palo Duro and Caprock canyons. So there you have it.

Nothing else is appealing to the motorist roaring through Amarillo. Nothing. Zero.

My question to TxDOT once again is this: Why can’t you do something to make the interchanges more eye-friendly to the thousands of motorists whose only view of Amarillo will from an automobile roaring through town at 65 mph?

Call your brethren in Boise to see how it’s done.

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