Ford Eulogy

Yes, he was kind of dumb and fell down a lot, but what people don't know about Gerry Ford is that in the very heart of the 70's, just when we needed it, he ended Watergate, the Vietnam War and the recession. And he was a lot cooler than people realize.

Pardoning Nixon was at the time considered traitorous. But we now view this act as not so bad. Ford wasn't so wrong that lynching Nixon, fun as it would have been, would have dragged all of us through the muck of retribution and it probably would have gotten out of hand. So good Ger, we did actually need a final cleansing to move past Watergate and heal. And history certainly judged Nixon as harshly as his critics would have wished.

Vietnam had dragged on for over a decade. But it was Ford's seeing the writing on the wall, and using his leadership and time in the House that finally influenced Congress to sufficiently withhold funding to let the war end. In September 1974, just a month after Ford assumed the Presidency, Congress appropriated only $700 million for South Vietnam. This left the South Vietnamese under-funded and resulted in a rapid and steep decline of military readiness and morale. In December, when North Vietnam violated the Paris peace treaty by attacking Phuoc Long Province in South Vietnam, Ford responded with diplomatic protests but no military force. The end came soon thereafter.

And while Ford got a lot of crap for Nixon's pardon, the flip side to that was a blanket pardon to over 100,000 draft evaders and military deserters. The amnesty offered was very far reaching, and covered convicted draft violators, convicted military deserters and AWOL's, draft violators who had never been tried, and veterans with less than honorable discharges for absence offenses.

Ford did much to contribute to a stronger US economy. When Ford came into office inflation was over 12 percent. He came up with the WIN (Whip Inflation Now) program and those cute WIN buttons and by 1975 inflation had dropped to 7 percent and was down to 4.6 percent by mid '76 when he was running for re-election. Unemployment dropped during his presidency as well. In March of '75, a total of 84.1 million persons had jobs. In July, 1976, employment had risen to an all-time high of 87.9 million, an increase of 3.8 million jobs in a little over a year. Unemployment was 8.9 percent in May 1975, but by July 1976, it was down to 7.8 percent.

Ford accomplished this by tightly controlling spending. Despite being from the House, he vetoed more legislation - percentage-wise - than just about any president. He wielded the power of the Presidential veto 55 times, citing the need to battle inflation. The total dollar savings from his vetoes was about $10 billion, as Congress upheld 45 of the vetoes.

More than all this, he restored honesty and integrity to the executive branch. The guy really had no guile. I met him once, and I could see it right away. He was like my grandpa. He came from that last generation of Americans that could afford to be honest.

The sense of stability he transmitted was another reason the economy improved. But the other benefit from Ford's nature was the era of Good Times that swept the land once Nixon left the stage. For Ford had that greatest of great presidential qualities. He was a hands off guy. He knew our country was enjoying the biggest party in the history of the world, and he let us get on with it. Once Nixon was gone, and Rock Music and disco and glam and popularization of the 60's as the 70's and everything that went with it had arrived, mid-70's America became what we all now know it to have been: the zenith of Western civilization. Time will vindicate those who believe it that that was the peak. And Gerry was our absentee landlord. Thank you Gerry.

Of course, he was also a pretty tough dude. He survived 2 assassination attempts, as well as hitting his head and tripping a lot. LBJ once said, "That guy's played too many football games without his helmet," but 93 years old is a testament to some pretty healthy living. And let's not forget the bravery of his wife Betty, who was the first first lady alcoholic in a long and tawdry history of several first lady alcoholics to admit it and go into rehab. But what we don't normally appreciate is that Betty invented rehab. The Betty Ford Clinic formed the basis for the recovery movement that continues to this day.

A little known fact is that once Ford got into office, he did pretty good for the environment too. Though never ratified by congress, in 1975 he proposed an energy program that would have given the US energy independence by 1985. He did put the Energy Research and Development Administration into law which provided for the creation of alternative energy supplies such as solar and geothermal energy.
He also got passed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, which among other things set up the now well-known national gasoline emergency reserves system.

During his presidency, there were no Americans fighting other nation's wars. Ford was the first President since Eisenhower who ran for election without a single American fighting overseas. And he gave us the first mini-military victory after a losing war, successfully sending Air Force and Marines to take back the freighter Mayaguez, seized by Cambodian Commies.

Crime was increasing at a rate of 18 percent a year when Ford took office. The rate of increase went down to 9 percent the following year, and in the first quarter of '76 had dropped to 4 percent.

The thing that always nailed him, his infamous quote that "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration," sounds less asinine when you read his follow up to the moderator's request for clarification:

"I don't believe, Mr. Frankel, that the Yugoslavians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don't believe that the Romanians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don't believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. Each of those countries is independent, autonomous: it has its own territorial integrity and the United States does not concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union. As a matter of fact, I visited Poland, Yugoslavia and Rumania to make certain that the people of those countries understood that the president of the United States and the people of the United States are dedicated to their independence, their autonomy and their freedom."

I get and appreciate his point here. And it was proved true 12 years later. So thanks Gerry. You were a helluva guy. You stood up for what was right, and you did it with humility, and without a single vote being cast.

It's the Stupidity, Stupid!

I really think John "I botched the joke" Kerry may be a robot programmed by Richard Nixon to destroy the Democratic party. Why on earth is he apologizing for trying to tell the truth? Everybody says that a politician can’t get elected if he or she speaks honestly about hard issues. But how can we know if no one ever tries it?

If I were John Kerry, I would fight back with the whole truth, and it would go something like this:

Former GOP congressman Mac Collins, who is trying to oust Democratic Rep. Jim Marshall, attacked what I said about how stupid we are to be in Iraq by saying: "The men and women who serve in our all-volunteer armed forces are plenty smart." I have no problem with that. But I said if you don't study and don't do your homework, you end up in Iraq. And indeed, that is why we are there. This is a stupid war, and anyone responsible for getting us into it is stupid.

Now, Mr. Collins won’t admit it, but you and I know that joining the Army is pretty much the only way for the poor and uneducated to get out of poverty and get an education in our country anymore. But no one believes it was our troops’ decision. We are in Iraq because our government is stupid. And the rest of us are all just stupid for letting it happen.

Since we’re talking about stupidity, however, I would speculate that the average intelligence in the USA of people who support the war is far lower than those who don't. And there's a very interesting reason as to why this is. Because the war is stupid! For those who did not understand my comments the first time, let me elaborate. We are stupid to be in Iraq! Dumb. Not smart. Being stupid and being in Iraq are synonymous.

Simply stated, it is commonly recognized that favoring brute force versus attempting to use reason to work things out generally reveals a lack of intelligence. And yet, despite all our ideals and so-called values, our country, the one we're supposed to believe in, the good ole USA, out of the blue, totally unprovoked, started bombing innocent people in Iraq. You can lay a story over it but the story doesn’t stick. You can say that it was because there was an immediate threat, but it's been very clearly shown that that was a made up lie.

The reality is that a day came where we just started bombing and invading Iraq, causing a world of pain and suffering, and unleashing untold violence that did not exist until we forced ourselves upon them. And you are not smart, and you did not study or do your homework, if you can't, don't or won't see that. By the way, a country is not just stupid if it denies or ignores this reality, it is in big trouble. So the real discussion to have here is how are we going to come to terms with the fact that our country has caused tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of innocent people to be killed and to suffer.

So when I say we are stupid to fight the way we are, I refer to the uneducated and thoroughly discredited opinion that the US can and should militarize its way out of the threats our country faces from the Muslim world. Even the US Army now admits that our policy has increased terrorism and hugely increased anti-US sentiment. Stupid is the old paradigm: "Arabs only understand violence." The idea that Bush and his cronies continue to push, that our only hope is to crush them, is racist and dead wrong. It's racist because it implies they can't respond to anything short of the logic of being crushed, and it's wrong because you can't crush a billion people. You can only win them over. Once the USA realizes that our only hope for winning is to win people over, we will stop trying to hurt them and make them cry uncle. They're not going to cry uncle. They're going to get more angry and become more willing to resort to more extreme methods of self-expression that reach more and more into our own world.

So let’s take a lesson: If you don't do your homework and you aren't smart, you get stuck in Iraq! Really! Really stuck! Really really dumb. Thank you.

I'm Jewish and So Am I

Probably won't come as a big shock to anybody, but my real name is Samuel and I'm a Jew. That's because all Americans are Jews, and not just because the same spirit that posited the Jewish idea also posited the American idea. Because the world is going to start treating the Americans the way they treat the Jews. that's the real reason. But that's a discussion for another day. I'm coming out here though, because I just read an article in Sunday's New York Times by Bernard-Henry Levy entitled Pondering, Discussing, Traveling Amid and Defending the Inevitable War, and I think it's time I drew the line for me and my fellow Jews, since at this point it's really the same thing as the line we need to draw for us as Americans. So as you read this and hear me talking to the Jews, every time I say Jew, I want you to read "American." OK?

So what Levy wrote was a means of justifying Israel's behavior: "But why shouldn’t what is due to some also be due to others?" This is the old question of why can't the Jews treat our enemies the way our enemies treat us? Good question. The answer is a version of the Hasidic teaching that God’s manner of distributing reward or punishment is not necessarily the manner of men. When Jews complain: "We mourn when we accidentally kill their innocents. They celebrate when our innocents die," that is sadly, but certainly, correct. But Arabs or Muslims dancing at our death is likewise not our concern or affair. That is between them and God. When Jews envy the lower moral standard non-Jews are held to, this is a version of the 'evil eye' Jesus spoke of in Matthew 20. The only comparison to be made is with the truth.

As the Bible progresses and the Jews emerge, they increasingly distinguish themselves as a people created by a social contract, setting themselves apart, not just as another tribe, but a people defined by morality. This is truly unprecedented and as has been noted by most legal scholars, forms the basis for common law as we now know it. Furthermore, this act of positing ourselves as a conscious entity, and the boundaries forged by insisting on values that have their basis in consciousness, formed the basis for civil society, as well as of the Jews as a people. To forsake these values to preserve the people defined by them is not an option. Indeed, it's not even a logical possibility.

I know it seems unfair that we are Jews, but we are. Painful as it sounds, nothing Arabs or Muslims do is a justification for anything we do; that is God's law. It's a straight line to God and comparison is not an option. The proof of the good is in the result. Lévy claims that Israel is justified in what for her is a less discriminating response to violence because of the increasingly unabashed and popular calls for the end to Israel. And because Iran and its agent will soon have nuclear weapons capable of achieving this aim, he argues that we need to be willing to "go after" Hezbollah and be less precise than we might like to be in targeting our bombs, insofar as our enemy has begun to act on these lethal threats.

But speaking as a Jew I would argue: Of course we need to go after them, but in a way that works. Politicians can pridefully pontificate all day long, but at the end of the day our real goal is survival. And survival may prove difficult insofar as we are totally surrounded by Arab countries that want to annihilate us. So while I agree that we may, in some sense, have the 'right' to bomb their neighborhoods, since that is absolutely where the attacks come from, we do need to decide if that which we have the right to do is that which we should do for the good of the Jews. It's not about being right. It's not about teaching anybody a lesson. It is far more serious than that. We must ask ourselves what is the highest good, and I would argue the highest good is the survival of the Jews as Jews.

Now, it is not debatable that we have transformed the vast majority of the population of Lebanon from being against Hezbolla to being pro Hezbolla, and that with popular will goes political will and military might. With these newly energized forces now so strongly in favor of wiping out Isreal, we have greatly diminished her chances for survival. Nor can we continue to ignore that similar attempts using brute force (finally we are putting the lie to the right's constant refrain: "all the Arabs understand is strength") have increasingly backfired. From time to time, talking heads on the news from Israeli leadership triumphantly announce the death of this or that member of the terrorist leadership because we bombed a building and killed a number of people, a terrorist leader among them. Necessary and acceptable casualties, we say. But until we admit and come to terms with how many new leaders this morally weak and inferior approach breeds, we will remain on the losing end.

I really don't need to debate this with anybody any more. Just look at the numbers! Please, because they are getting really bad. It's as if there is a monster that can either be fed or not fed. And the monster is a huge number of average people now living their lives for the destruction of the Jews. (We Jews can say: "but the Jews are not Israel," but that is a distinction the monster no longer makes.) So if the devotion is not to the negative pleasure of retribution, but to the unassailable value of surviving _as Jews_, then I say we as Jews have to be willing to do what works, and accept the cosmic challenge presented to the Jews: to continue to discriminate. I am not saying that we should not strike back. I am however saying that we must strike back very precisely, maintaining our moral core, in a way that allows us to emerge victorious.

Our only options at this stage are very risky and unattractive. What is demanded of us is man-to-man, knife-in-the-teeth, incredibly well coordinated, life-or-death, highly tactical and righteous behavior. The last phase of the battle is on pause, but given that we may have subsequent phases with similar charactaristics, let me share what I would have done regarding the most recent transgression. My solution would have been to make a very big deal about how we will not respond in kind, meanwhile marshalling all our resources and attacking every known person who is active in Hezbolla, in a manner similar to the way we went after the Munich terrorists after the '68 Olympics. A full court press using the best of Israeli intelligence and technology, as precision-guided as a laser beam, but with a tremendous amount of information up front about what our intentions are (in this case: invade to a buffer zone and wait for the UN to send peacekeeper forces), tied to an information campaign about the moral limits we are placing on the war campaign, would have been a saner way to victory.

It would have been slow, it would have been ugly, it would have been extremely dangerous, all of that and worse. But it would have had - and next chance we get it still would have - one advantage: it would be morally unassailable and it would work. We would be able to enlist Jews worldwide with a multitude of outreach methods. Call it propaganda or even bribery, but we would be appealing to and using any and every backchannel and media outlet to let the world know we will not bomb back the way they are bombing us. But. We will neither accept this behavior. We will reject it in a manner that makes it utterly clear who we are and why we are not going away. We will do what Jews do best: we will discriminate.

We are dealing with the hopes and aspirations of the human spirit here, and to emerge victorious we must address it. Like Iraq, ultimately, we cannot militarize our way out of this situation. This is all about hearts and minds, and for better or worse, for us, there is no path to victory that cannot travel the moral high ground.

We must unite around these tenets. Just because they kill innocents does not mean we should. This logic is unassailable, and emanates from the holy of holies. It says: Our very reason for being is nothing if not that our values prohibit us from this kind of behavior. If we sacrifice our reason for being in order to be, we by definition cease to be. To fail to be ourselves is to fail ultimately, and so we will fail.

I know this path is correct because everybody is upset with me for advocating it. The left is angry that I am advocating some aspect of retaliation or at least non-pacifism. The right is angry because they fear weakness. I am not saying we should lie down and take it. But we are a traumatized people, and so are they. We face off, and both of us see ancient enemies. They see the Ottomans and oppressors throughout history, and we see the Nazis. Of course it's terribly sad and disheartening to see 60 years later - given how triggered we are - how successful Hitler ended up being. Only the persecuted overreacts the way these two ancient enemies do. How ironic that the cause of each of our trauma is not the other. But we see our abusers in the other, and as the abused, we lash out. Each side in this conflict is unfortunately acting out of its trauma in a way which may doom both sides.

And indeed, many of my colleagues, Jewish and otherwise, believe WWIII has softly begun. There may be a temporary cease fire, but the story behind the scenes is that the Arab / Muslim street is now highly radicalized and enrolled in a way as never before in calling for Israel's destruction. A plausable scenario, where following this phase the Arabs arm to the teeth and prepare for the end game. And the next time antagonisms will escalate more, and there will be bigger bombs, and more death and destruction, and ultimately boom goes Tel Aviv and boom goes Beirut, or we may say Megiddo (the town between Israel and Lebanon whose name forms the basis for the word Armageddon).

What is going to stop it? Nobody knows, but it will be some alternative that looks more attractive than the negative pleasure of the status quo. Our way there involves a solution that is built from a different approach, one that is willing to distinguish between what we have the right to do, and what we actually must do to win. My father has a saying: "You can be right, but do you want to be dead right?" It's not about being right. It's about not stoking an insane, monstrous fire that we cannot control. Unfortunately our enemies are not in control of it either.

There exists a very narrow path between sacrificing ourselves and the kind of retribution we are engaged in. It is a hair's breadth wide and cut into a cliff, and we must divine it on a moonless night. The ability to distinguish such a thing seems almost impossible. But we're Jews. That's what we do.