Dead President:
The nicest thing that can be said about the dead man is that Gerald Ford wasn't bugfuck insane, and these days that is not faint praise. He was a selfish pragmatist who gave one of the nation's great criminals a pass (and thus set up our politicians' queasiness at putting George W. Bush away). Yeah, he gave us Justice Stevens, but he tried to impeach William O. Douglas while in Congress. He helped inflict Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld on us, something that gets him extra time in purgatory. He got us the fuck out of Vietnam, finally, at last, and he offered clemency to draft dodgers, but he helped wreck the environment, told New York City to go fuck itself (as an example of an administration bereft of anything resembling urban policy), and was a fairly worthless ex-President.

And while you may hear about his pro-choice street cred as a sign of his moderation, here's Ford, perhaps pandering for votes, in a letter to the Archbishop of Cincinnati in September 1976: "Since 1973 I have viewed as the most practical means of rectifying the situation created by the Court's action a Constitutional amendment that would restore to each State the authority to enact abortion statutes which fit the concerns and views of its own citizens."

No, let's put it this way: the nicest thing that can be said about Gerald R. Ford was that he didn't fuck things up even worse in the wake of Richard Nixon.

Sidenote: The Rude Pundit has a letter from President Ford from 1974, thanking the young Rude Pundit for his interest in garbage recycling. Feel free to make your own joke here.