"Here is Gerald Goddamned Ford’s legacy, as Mark Updegrove’s trifle of a book Second Acts: Presidential Lives and Legacies After the White House documents: Ford was the first post-president to cash in on his celebrity. Soon after he was defeated by Jimmy Carter in 1976, Ford was making a million dollars a year in endorsements and speeches and honorary titles. He even appeared on Dynasty, for fuck’s sake. Ford once said, “I think it’s progress that the presidency has been humanized,” and it’s telling of his evil heart that to humanize the presidency meant to squeeze every single penny that he could out of the office to which he was never elected before finally succumbing to pneumonia and heart failure and practically every single ailment that God could muster.
"Still, today the newspapers coo over how Gerald Goddamned Ford saved America from the “long national nightmare” of Watergate, many of them using Ted Goddamned Kennedy’s regrettable 2001 quote, from when Gerald Ford won a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award.
“Time has a way of clarifying past events,” Teddy said, “and now we see that President Ford was right.”
"This, of course, is bullshit. What Gerald Ford saved us from was a nation where Richard Nixon went to jail or committed suicide, a nation where politicians would have to face real legal consequences for their actions, a nation where politicians are responsible for the people under them, and to the people who voted for them. What Gerald Goddamned Ford gave to America is the wave of cynicism that has dominated politics and ensured wave after wave of ever-worsening Republican presidents, preying on our basest fears.
"Our long national nightmare didn’t end with Ford. It began with him. [Emphasis mine.]
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