Gerald Ford died for your sins

Says Saddam Hussein, “I sacrifice myself.” Like they gave him a choice? “If God wills it, he will place me among the true men and martyrs.” Curiously, these were also Gerald Ford’s last words.

Everyone is going on about Ford’s role in giving Indonesia permission to invade East Timor, which is true as far as it goes, although I tend to think the entire world was silently complicit in that one, and for many years. But for some reason, no one is talking about his covert support of UNITA in Angola, some of the most evil bastards on the planet during the Welcome Back Kotter Years. (And by the way, let’s a give big hand to the Portuguese, whose massively incompetent colonialism created both situations, and Guinea-Bissau, which they left with the lowest life expectancy in the world and not a single college graduate in the whole country).

And while everyone’s mentioning that Ford’s administration included Cheney and Rumsfeld, they’re mostly forgetting his director of central intelligence, one George Herbert Walker Bush.

Still the best Republican president of my lifetime.

Which doesn’t say much for Republican presidents.

Or my lifetime.