It's not a hill either one of us needs to die on. I was around when Ford was President, and in the intervening years, and I know that neither I nor the "mainstream media" harbored any illwill towards the man. I know too, and because of that, that it would indeed be a massive effort to sift through three decades of journalism to come up with even a small number of examples of criticism of Ford.

I think that you recollect things a bit differently because of a bitter partisan filter. You, like many Conservatives, want to believe that everybody hates you. It seems to sustain the partisan passion, perhaps out of a self-aggrandizing David-and-Goliath myth.

I point that out not to criticize, but because it triggers my empathy instinct. It seems terribly masochistic, and I perceive a pain because of it, albeit a self-inflicted pain; and it cuts you off from participating fully in social occasions such as paying tribute to the passing of a former President. There was no need to inject partisan bitterness into this thread. Absent the partisanship, this is an occasion, as it was when Ronald Reagan died, to perform the necessary cleansing ritual of finding the things about the recently deceased that are worthy of praise, and putting the past to rest by speaking only quietly, if at all, of that person's faults. With Gerald Ford it would've been an unusually positive occasion, because there's so little about the man that's worth criticizing now that he's gone, let alone while he lived.

He was one of yours, Tom, and the fact that the rest of us consider him one of ours too shouldn't keep you from celebrating his life. You can share Gerald Ford with us. He belongs to America.