Showing posts with label Ford. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ford. Show all posts

Monday, October 29, 2007

Tom DeFrank just published a book called Write It When I'm Gone, a collection of things that Gerald Ford told him on the condition that they not be published until after Ford's death. Regarding Bill Clinton, according to Meet the Press, Ford said this:

Ford ... returned to his Clinton head-shaking theme without any prompting. "I don't understand why any of his cabinet hasn't resigned [because of the Lewinsky scandal]. How can they keep working for him after he lied to them?"
Seriously? Gerald Ford said that? Gerald "I’m convinced Nixon had nothing whatsoever to do with Watergate" Ford? I know he was famous for being a bumbling idiot, but surely even he must have seen the irony there.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Slate's Jack Shafer makes an amusing point:

On the occasion of President Gerald R. Ford's death, the press applied the word decent to him so often that it stopped sounding like praise and started to sound like an insult.
...
Ask the average reporter or commentator to pass quick judgment on somebody who just died and as likely as not they'll reach for something that combines lukewarm praise with an appropriate cliché. If it's a New Englander in the casket, they might go with "flinty." For an African-American, especially if they don't want to go on record as agreeing with him, they'll probably pick "articulate." For a Latino, "industrious" or "passionate." When assessing the sons and daughters of that great flyover territory known as the Midwest, the formula suggests pale platitudes about honor, honesty, and being decent, as long as the word means "adequate" and "just enough to meet the purpose."