In a purely transient political sense, it was also totally unpopular and played at least some role in Ford's defeat in 1976 as well as hamstringing his shortened administration. (On the plus side, disgust with the pardon is what spurred a lot of good oversight legislation and a lot of turning over of rocks to look further at the crawling things hiding underneath.) But that's our Sanctimonious Political Class for you: always ready to endorse a catastrophically stupid own-goal political move that is also dubious ethically in deeper ways in order to pursue a vision of phony top-level consensus that is mostly about making sure they live in the most narrowly frictionless world possible for facilitating their own financial and institutional deal-making.
I mean, this is the thing -- it's certainly not an appealing metaphor for Biden, it's objectively pro-Trump in very simple ways, and all that besides. I also think that Ford was probably right that _a_ cessation of the inquiry was politically expedient but he bungled it very badly. OF course, he almost won in 1976, against quite a few odds.
In a purely transient political sense, it was also totally unpopular and played at least some role in Ford's defeat in 1976 as well as hamstringing his shortened administration. (On the plus side, disgust with the pardon is what spurred a lot of good oversight legislation and a lot of turning over of rocks to look further at the crawling things hiding underneath.) But that's our Sanctimonious Political Class for you: always ready to endorse a catastrophically stupid own-goal political move that is also dubious ethically in deeper ways in order to pursue a vision of phony top-level consensus that is mostly about making sure they live in the most narrowly frictionless world possible for facilitating their own financial and institutional deal-making.
I mean, this is the thing -- it's certainly not an appealing metaphor for Biden, it's objectively pro-Trump in very simple ways, and all that besides. I also think that Ford was probably right that _a_ cessation of the inquiry was politically expedient but he bungled it very badly. OF course, he almost won in 1976, against quite a few odds.