WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

Yesterday the conservatives were deifying Jerry Ford in an act that I would guess the former President would have been bemused at. Jerry Ford is hardly the worst President we've ever had, there are arguably close to a couple dozen worse. He had a bad hand when he became President (but really mostly from the prospective of the status of the Presidency), and he managed to not make things worse (the current occupant seems to be taking "bad President" to a whole new level). He also made some choices that are very debatable for their historical worth. What he really was, in a way, is the patron saint of the Washington Insider Club (High Broderism see Atrios) that believes themselves to be "serious" adults and the rest of the country to be shallow, non-comprehending, poorer people.

He was hardly in the pantheon of Great or Near Great. In his own words, he was a "Ford not a Lincoln". An average President presiding over a time of retrenchment and uncertainty, with sizeable majorities of the opposite party in both houses arrayed against him. I certainly understand the necessity to not speak ill of the recently departed, to show some respect, but let's not deify the non-deities of our history.

Having staked themselves to the position that Jerry gave them their heroes Rummy & Cheney and that he supported Bush yesterday, the conservatives, once again have the colorful truth dumped upon their black & white world (or would that be monochrome George Will?):

In a four-hour conversation at his house in Beaver Creek, Colo., Ford "very strongly" disagreed with the current president's justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously. In the tape-recorded interview, Ford was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney -- Ford's White House chief of staff -- and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as Ford's chief of staff and then his Pentagon chief.

"Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction," Ford said. "And now, I've never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do."

Now, of course, let the whining begin over publishing this interview while they were deifying the corpse. To them it is all about winning the talking point battle, the fact that the truth was embargoed for two and a half years is irrelevant (except to the extent it kept Bush from losing the 2004 election, surely not a big deal right?). The truth is not supposed to come out until no one notices.