Jerry Ford

I see our other appointed president has been admitted to the hospital.

I was pretty young when all that occurred, though old enough to watch the news. At the time Ford pardoned Nixon, every pundit with lips said it was the best thing for the country. It was a giant echo chamber claiming that trying Nixon would somehow besmirch our image in the world, weaken the national resolve, some crap like that.
The national resolve to do what? Commit crime in high office?
Now that I've lived a while, now that I've been subjected to decades of repiglikkkan rule and now that I've stopped watching "news" in favor of pursuing real information from a wide variety of sources, I must say pardoning Nixon was a colossal mistake.
It was alarming when Nixon died, the way history was rewritten by the vacuous commentary of falsely authoritative TV talking heads, really noxious ones like Tom Brokaw, a man who appeared to tumesce at every mention of a republican throughout the duration of his on air career.
They, these media weasels, transformed this paranoiac, lying, cheating war criminal into a national hero as they buried him. And they forgot what his policies actually wrought in this nation, and tried to make us forget.
A trial of Nixon might have healed the nation from his dirty reign and maybe, just maybe, slowed the juggernaut of dirty politics, the anything goes to get in office that is destroying the county right now.
But all I really remember about Ford for sure is that he tripped and fell a lot, his wife was such a drunk a famous rehab clinic was named after her and he pardoned Nixon.