It’s probably a pathology that infects most bloggers.  I have actually thought “I wonder how I will blog the death of Gerald Ford”.  And then I have formulated, in my head, proposed blog posts about Gerald Ford.

One of the thoughts on the proposed blog posts upon the death of Gerald Ford was the preceeding paragraph.  Also the proceeding paragraph.  This paragraph, I can honestly say, has never crossed my mind in such stray thoughts.

If you line up the five presidents before Gerald Ford and the five presidents following Gerald Ford, what you will find is that Gerald Ford leaves less of a mark than all of them.  And that answers the question, “How will history record Gerald Ford?”  The answer is it won’t.  It’ll skip right past him.  Note him and move right along.  That’s not to say that notable things didn’t happen with Ford — there are precursors and post-cursors everywhere, and certainly during the Ford Presidency — which had ideolouges formulating the “Unitary Executive” theory of governance, for example.  But Ford will never be associated with such items.

Pop culture-wise, Ford’s administration represents a bleak time in American pop-cultural history.  The year 1974 strikes me as horrendous.  Ford’s tenure brings me to mind Pet Rocks.  It’s weird how I have mental snap-shots in my head, and it’s weird how any redeeming qualities from the era commonly known as the 60s fade away right in the year 1974 — as though We no longer have Nixon to kick around, and so there’s nothing to counter-act except blandness, which we must as a culture merge into.  It was a tacky time, and I don’t know if I can pin it entirely on economic hard times or if something else was at play.

The conventional wisdom — pardoning Nixon was good — may not be right and may have set bad precedents for further political chicanery.  Or it may have been good.  Debate amongst yourselves.  I myself hate that conventional wisdom has gelled so perfectly — it is a sign of the establishment forcing something which may or may not be true and probably is only half so down our throats.

So there you have it.  Gerald Ford.  Dead.  Was he in your “dead pool”?  By the 100 minus year rules you would have seven points.  If you already calculated your Dead pool points, run back and add seven points now.  Maybe it’ll be enough to pull you into the lead.

In November of 1974, for reasons that are unclear to me and probably are unexplainable in any event, Lyndon Larouche spoke before the House and Senate committees on whether to confirm Nelson Rockefellar as Gerald Ford’s vice president.

Mr. LaRouche, who also testified before the Senate panel, read a statement calling for the rejection of Mr. Rockefellar because of his “family’s stated program for world reorganization,” which he said was modelled “after the conceptions of Hitler’s finance minister, Hjalmar Schocht.” LaRouche also spoke about “Rockefeller’s supernatural conspiracy” and said that “the criminal stupidity and immorality of Rockefellar’s fascist economic programs leads directly to general ecological holocaust.”

LaRouche’s rhetoric was criticized by several members of the committee, with Representative John Conyers, Jr saying that he felt LaRouche had highly overstated the case. “Some of the terminology creates the suspicion that these may be unprovable statement.”

Perhaps he was invited as a matter of courtesy after Larouchites disrupted some Watergate proceedings earlier in the year.

It occurs to me that Nelson Rockeller had long been a man open to conspiracy theories — rich and firmly wedded to the establishment as he. More mainstream conservative Republicans didn’t much like Rockefeller, and still today the term “Rockefeller Republican” is a slur.

LaRouche is generally said to have moved from the “far Left” to the “far Right” at this point in time. I congratulage everyone who is able to ascribe ideological swings of any type, but the collection of political causes that he collected seems irrelevant. The basics remain in place. First, you start with the Grand Unified Theory of everything. He’s the world’s greatest economist, don’t you know, and that’s because he follows Plato and Classical Music instead of the godfather of Baby-boomers and their rock and roll, Aristotle. And, the world is out to get him. And he needs to gain control of the world lest it suffer from the impending economic collapse.

I don’t know what goes on the man’s head. Perhaps he noticed the shift in the political winds, saw that 60s Radicalism was dying, and tossed his lot in pursuing various disaffected groups of the right and conservative persuasions. When I look at his supposed election coalition for 1976, I do notice the spring-born for how his group did manage to wreck havoc on the Democratic Party in 1986 — filling a vacuum.

So he was now fighting anti-Apartheid groups, and peddling dossiers on them. He was advocating nuclear power. He was fighting the Zionist Drug Cabal — or was it the British Royal Family’s Drug Cabal? And he advocated the Gold Standard. As a whole, the John Birch Society shoved him aside, but he gained a foothold in certain black helicopter segments (such that today he can make appearances on Jeff Rense’s radio show).

I finally have found the concrete steps LaRouche took to get from the far left to the far right. The Liberty Lobby advertised and sold copies of a 129 page report from the Labor Council that exposed the “Carter / Rockefeller/ CIA” plot to “deindustrialize” America and go to war with the Soviet Union by 1978. That Bircher-like organization’s news organ, Spotlight, called NCLS “probably the only honest Marxist group in the US because it is not supported by Rockefeller money.” Politics makes for strange bed fellows, perhaps, by more appropriately, Conspiracy theories do. The other item is LaRouche hiring a former Batista security advisor to help him agains the assasination plots from the Maoist “Bader Mernhof Organization”. If he says so.

In 1976, LaRouche made his first run for president. And the following would be repeated in all subsequent runs:

“In about mid-September an international monetary crisis will threaten the dollar and every other currency, accompanying the complete collapse of United States assets in banks abroad. At that time, national politics will become one of the most prominent features of the new situation. Jimmy Carter will be eliminated as a credible figure. The people will have a choice between two credible candidates: Ford and LaRouche. My qualifications in international economics will become important; I’m probably the world’s leading expert, in all modesty.”

He never did win the election. And while the economy was pretty darned sluggish, it didn’t quite collapse. I imagine at the heart of the perpetual apocalyptic economy is a stringing along of his followers, though he’s likely internalized the bad fever-dream.

Preparing for the 1980 election, he wrote in his autobiography about the political forces that were coming against him, and how “Whatever doesn’t kill you”… well… apparently makes you President:

The most powerful adversary presently available to anyone in the “Western World” has not only expressed his wish for my early demise, but has visibly deployed a coordinated force of slander and physical harassments, and has set into motion specialized capabilities of an assassination of a relevant sort. If I survive the months immediately before me at this moment of writing, it will become reasonable — at a rapid rate — that I might be iaugurated president of the United States in January of 1981.

I note for the record that he never said “elected”, which makes the other routes his mind hatched up to become president intriguing.

Lyndon LaRouche was just about to become a Democrat, starting (drum role please) the Democratic Policy Committee. The media would always have to place a disclaimer on the obvious that the DPC is not afffiliated with the DNC.  This was probably a wise decision, all things considered, the Democratic Party route. People don’t vote for third party candidates. Here, LaRouche ran for president in 1980, and receiving two percent in the New Hampshire primary, challenged for a recount, believing he received 20 percent of the vote.  The recount showed up an additional nine votes for him– and additional thousands for the right-in candidate Ronald Reagan, a sign of the Democratic Party’s troubles come November.

The Larouchites went to work attacking and confusing the Democratic establishment.  Wilcox Brown, New Hampshire’s widely respected Democratic National Committeeman, received a telephone call reently from a campaign worker for Democratic Presidential candidate Lyndon H LaRouche, Jr.  “Mr. Brown,” said the young woman who called, “if you don’t do anything about it when LaRouche is assassinated and you’ve done nothing to prevent it, then his blood’s going to be on your hands.”  (Boston Globe, 2-17-1980 “Freinge Candidate or Threat?”)  Also, by the way, the New Hampshire House Democratic leader, Chistos Spirou, had links to organized crime circles in Quebec, Montreal, and Greece that LaRouche was busy tracing and exposing.  But you already knew that.
The genius of the name LaRouche gave his new parasitic organization, “Democratic Policy Committee” — is shown that when a spokesperson calls up the Mexican government and states that they are from the “Democratic Policy Committee” — the Mexican government obliges the offer.

An interesting little article from April 11, 1986 in the New York Times concering LaRouche’s then new hometown. Of course it’s not online, but if you have access to the New York Times archives, try it and learn such things as:

Mr. LaRouche’s guns have raised eyebrows even here in the hunt country of Loudoun County.  “I have a major personal security problem,” Mr. LaRouche said in one leaflet, written while he was seeking permits for his bodyguards to carry concealed weapons.  Without the permits, he said, “the assassination teams of professional mercenaries now being trained in Canada and along the Mexico bordermay be expected to start arriving on the streets of Leeburg.  If they come, there will be many people dead or mutilated within as short an interval as sixty seconds of fire.”

AND

Local merchants say [The Loudoun News — local publication from Larouche]has run advertisements for their businesses without permission, apparently to give the impression of community support for Mr. LaRouche. Danaura Smith, who with her husband runs R and D Furniture, said she was approached by a salesman for The News but said no. Then the paper reprinted an advertisement she had run in The Washington Post. When she complained to the salesman, she said, “He told me I was harassing him.” Mr. Spannaus, the LaRouche spokesman denied that advertisements had been run without merchants’ permission.

AND

Few Loudoun County residents say they have seen Mr. LaRouche, but when he made a rare visit to town about a year ago — associates of his were opening a bookstore — security guards with walkie – talkies staked out each corner, said a shopkeeper, Molly Mosher.  They were not uniformed, but easy to spot, she said, explaining that all wore sunglasses but were “sort of nerdy looking for Secret Service.”

Miss Mosher, who sells children’s clothing and toys, asked “How can you run a children’s store with armed guards outside?”

AND

Last fall, organizations dominated by LaRouche applied for a zoning variance to open a children’s summer camp at Sweetwater Farm, a 65-acre tract near Neersville in Loudoun County.  At the zoning hearing, a photographer who said he was with Campaigner Publications took pictures of those who spoke against the variance.  The picture-taking was legal, but the sheriff and others said the intent was intimidation.  Mr. Spannaus said the photographer also took pictures of those who spoke for the variance.

Mrs. Harrison spoke against it, as did Pauline Giruin, the lwayer who is now in hiding.  She had collected signatures from neighbors on a petition to stop the camp, fearing that it might become a weapons training ground.

While Miss Giruin was being interviewed on a Leesburg Street by WRC-TV, an NBC affiliate in Washington, someone walked behind her and, according to Miss Giruin, said, “Polly, you’re going to die.” The television reporter said on the air that the comment sounded like a threat. Law enforcement officials said it could not be the basis for an arrest.

Miss Giruin, in a telephone interview from what she said was “a safe house” said she left town after receiving telephone threats and after a car repeatedly pulled into and out of her driveway.

The article also features dead animals in yards — and LaRouche’s libel lawsuit regarding accusations of responsibility, a shop-lifting spree by a group of LaRouchites attending a conference on running for office, and general paranoia aroused by the populace.