Used Fords

Via Somerby, this may be one of the most astonishing things to emerge, fully formed, from the foaming brain stem of David Broder, aka, "The Dean."

Many of those alumni who first exercised real power under Ford remained active in government. For all that he has borrowed from Ronald Reagan, President Bush owes the greatest debt to three stalwarts of economic and national security policy inherited from Ford -- Vice President Cheney and former defense secretary Don Rumsfeld, both former chiefs of staff to Ford, and former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, Ford's chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

Cheney and Rumsfeld, stalwarts of national security policy. Good lord. In The Dean's world, the architects for failure in Afghanistan and Iraq are "stalwarts." In The Dean's world, failure really isn't an option as long as it such wise men doing the failing.

Oh yes, and that other stalwart, this one of economic policy, who presided over a boom of Clinton's and Rubin's making, and who would then go on to become cheerleader #1 of the Bush Tax Cut Deficit Creation Plan. Bravo, Mr. Greenspan, bravo.

The Dean's world: Truly, the Third Stone From the Sun.

From the same newspaper...

Former president Gerald R. Ford said in an embargoed interview in July 2004 that the Iraq war was not justified. "I don't think I would have gone to war," he said a little more than a year after President Bush launched the invasion advocated and carried out by prominent veterans of Ford's own administration.

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."

That was two and a half years ago. But for David Broder, hubristic old criminals like Cheney and Rumsfeld are stalwarts to whom we all owe a debt.