Gerald Ford, Do Not RIP

So, kind, genial Gerald Ford is dead. Kind, genial, and a fool - the one who let Richard Nixon escape in 1974 without paying for his Watergate crimes with hard prison time. Ford was desperate to rid himself of the Watergate monkey, but we all paid a price for his desperation. If Nixon had been tried and served time, Dick Cheney's ambitious program to resurrect the (supposedly) lost powers of the presidency would have been handicapped, and George Bush would have been much less able to embark on his current series of madcap criminal escapades, from Guatanamo to the Iraq War to spying on everyone. It was time then, and it is time now, for the Chief Executive to pay some kind of real penalty for using the Constitution as firewood kindling.