What?

Truth be told, I invoked Starr's name just to needle you. "90's Democrats" react to that name the way current MSNBC pundits react to "Sarah Palin", you guys go into full body convulsions like a lab monkey on amphetamines.

But perhaps invoking that name worked a little too well, because I found your post rather, well, a tad incoherent.

First, I can't ask "Gerry" Ford, nor can anyone else, he's deceased.

But more to the point I don't really "get" your position on Clinton. You cop to his low moral character, but then offer some degree of, I guess, retroactive moral clemency because of his Senate acquittal? Nixon wasn't even tried. Was never brought up on a single charge. By your reasoning does he not then deserve an even greater degree of retroactive moral clemency? That just doesn't make sense to me. If you are going to admit that from Jennifer Flowers to Lewinski that Clinton was of low character, and lied straight faced to the nation numerous times, then do so. He wasn't being tried in Congress for banging women that weren't his wife, so I fail to see why how his acquittal factors into it. The bottom line is he'll forever be a punch line for cigar jokes, just as Nixon ensured the name "Dick" would forever be associated with the word "tricky" (man is there a mammoth joke in there somewhere!).

And speaking of Nixon...

Lumping the Ford pardon into this just seems bizarre to me. Clinton pardoned a Puerto Rican terrorist, reportedly to ensure Hillary's electability in New York. Lincoln pardoned Confederates. Men whom actively took up arms against their government. A pardon is a unique Constitutional Right of the CIC. You can argue which pardons were worthy of the signature and which weren't, but I wouldn't toss them into a debate about morality or lapses in judgement involving sex scandals.

In fact, I could argue Ford's pardoning of Millhouse was COURAGEOUS. Despite the best efforts of Chevy Chase on SNL, Ford was no dummy. He simply had to know how politically risky it was to pardon Nixon. He had to know that it may well cost him reelection, they had polling data back then. In fact his only shot may have been to crucify his former boss. Yet he didn't do the politically expedient thing for his own career. I always presumed that on the heels of Vietnam and Watergate he decided the country had had enough of being torn apart at the seams, and he put the nation's interests ahead of his own. Why else do something that would so obviously condemn his political future? And while freeing terrorists, like Slick Willy did, isn't what I would use the pardon for, it is an unquestionable Right of the chief executive and not something worth mentioning along side "Weiner-Gate." In my opinion this is particularly true with the Nixon pardon - Ford used the power of the pardon for precisely what it was designed to do, heal the nation and move on. I don't see a "judgement" parallel with sex tweeting, or phallic uses of a good stogie.