His death was marked by apathy, but Gerald Ford was the USA’s greatest 20th-century President, says alexander cockburn |
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These days a hefty slab of the teenagers alive in America will supposedly live to be 100 (presumably working till they drop to pay for the rest, jobless and dying from diabetes). Given the reproductive shadow hanging over America - poor semen quality, cryptorchidism, impaired fecundity - they won't have that many children, although the sparse litters will contain people likely to live to be 125, handing down horrible recipes for turkey giblet gravy to the next generation.
In short, there will be a lot of centenarians about and the name Gerald Ford will mean absolutely nothing to any of them. You had to have been born in 1960 to have been 14 in 1974, hence even vaguely conscious of the genial interregnum between Nixon and Carter over which Ford presided.
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| On New Year’s Eve, only 20 people were mustered at Capitol Hill to view Ford’s casket |
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A Maryland-based former weapons designer with a nose for conspiracy suggested to me the day after New Year's that Karl Rove masterminded the hoopla over Ford's passing - the postal holiday, the solemn elegies - all as a way of associating the beleagured presidency of G Bush with the supposedly popular Ford. If so, chalk it up as another clunker from Karl, whose magic touch has brought his employer to the lowest presidential popularity ratings in the history of the Republic.
On New Year's Eve, so the wire services reported, only 20 people were mustered at Capitol Hill to view Ford's casket in the Rotunda. George Bush excused himself from the state memorial, staying home in Crawford, Texas, presumably watching re-runs of Saddam's execution. Almost 500 of the 535 members of Congress had prior commitments. They had to scramble to find enough pall-bearers after Donald Rumsfeld missed his plane and James Baker was nowhere to be found. Even Justice John Stevens, whom Ford installed on the US Supreme Court and who
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