Wonkette

Betty Ford celebrates her 90th birthday today, and Wonkette offers up a hearty, nonalcoholic toast in her honor. For the 896 wonderful days of Gerald Ford’s presidency, this sassy dancing divorcee brought outspoken feminism and frank talk to the White House. And the pills, dear God, the pills and booze! MORE »

America has lost its greatest leader, Earl Butz. The racist Nixon-Ford Administration agriculture secretary always kept the white protestant Republicans laughing with his poetic comedy stylings. For example, back in 1974 he made fun of Pope Paul VI’s support of population control with a wacky fake-Italian accent: “He no playa the game, he no maka the rules.” But it was his whimsical, outrageously vulgar and racist view of America’s African-Americans that truly made his mark on the world. MORE »

The new Gerald Ford biography, Write It When I’m Gone, hits bookshelves tomorrow, and now we know why the ex-president was such a sissy about having to die before it came out: it drops bombshell after bombshell, and then drops more bombshells yet. Specifically, only Ford knew these two juicy bits of Beltway insiderism: Bill Clinton might be a sex addict, and Dick Cheney might be a liability to George W. Bush. OMG OMG OMG!#RR#@ MORE »

It’s a hallowed Autumn tradition to take the kids to the Corn Maze, but there’s extra fun in store for youngsters at Richland, Michigan’s Gulf Meadows Farms this year, because they’ve based their 2007 Corn Maze design on Gerald Ford’s head. Jerry Ford, of course, was our greatest president and he pardoned Nixon and covered up JFK’s assassination and almost got himself assassinated, twice in 17 days, in California, and bravely fought inflation and was from Michigan.

Gulf Meadows Farms Corn Maze

Just as Americans were getting over Ronald Reagan’s tragic death this morning, beloved temp-worker president Gerald Ford has also passed away. MORE »

* Heard on the Hill: Joe Biden has a history of saying crazy, stupid stuff… Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) thrilled to be mentioned by the blog of Bon Appetit magazine… Harry Reid forgot when Valentine’s Day is! [Roll Call]
* Reliable Source: Geraldine Ferraro’s back! With some lobbying firm. [WP]
* Yeas and Nays: Would you like to read the insane ramblings of consistently-wrong pundit Dick “Hillary Is a Lesbian Vampire” Morris? Here they are, enjoy… Creative Coalition party sounds like a good time. Frank Luntz called himself “the ugliest person in this room.” … Jim Talent’s back! Eatin’ some pizza, talkin’ about god. [Examiner]
* Under the Dome: Chuck Schumer has imaginary friends. They’re called the Baileys. Last year, they were called the O’Reillys. That’s “too ethnic,” apparently… Gerald Ford had way more nasty things to say about everyone that he didn’t want anyone to hear until he was dead. [The Hill]
* Shenanigans: The DCCC is $9 million in debt. Nancy Pelosi spent $30k on her Holiday Party! [Politico]
* Page Six: Bill Clinton doesn’t want to be president of your stupid university. [NYP]
* The Sleuth: More Ford stuff: NYDN reporter got Ford drunk. It has some terrible secret from 1974. [WP]

Beloved Watergate criminal E. Howard Hunt finally died this week at the rotten old age of 88 — just a week after he publicly blamed Lyndon Johnson for ordering the assassination of John F. Kennedy. As Hunt himself has long been suspected of being one of the CIA black-ops artists behind JFK’s murder in Dallas, that was a pretty weird revelation.

As he begins his eternal torture in Hell, let’s look back at the curiously rich and varied life of a man who maybe didn’t start off 100% crooked … after the jump.

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Yet more double-secret-probation Gerald Ford interviews have been revealed, this time from the vaults of the Grand Rapids Press. Jerry Ford was the kind of pretend president who gave these kind of interviews not only to Bob Woodward, but also to his hometown newspaper in Michigan. Who knows what secrets have yet to be unveiled by the Palm Desert Sun?!

Join us after the jump for Jerry Ford cold hatin’ on Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan as our super-special “That ’70s Week” mercifully comes to a close … assuming it will ever end at all.

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Watergate enraged certain people in all the wrong ways, and minor-league Nixon Administration factotums Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were among the few twisted Tories who thought it was bad that Congress wrestled control of the nation from a paranoid dictatorial police-state Executive Branch. Instead of being jailed forever, these two ended up running Ford’s White House and infiltrating the Reagan and Bush 41 White Houses like a particularly awful anti-constitutional virus. MORE »

Each week, the Comics Curmudgeon helps explain Today’s Cartoons.

The teeming throngs of you who follow this feature no doubt noticed that we here at Cartoon Violence were off waging our annual War on New Years last week. Normally, this wouldn’t have mattered, as all we would have missed was a bunch of retarded cartoons featuring little baby 2007s in diapers and stooped old 2006s with scythes and hourglasses, but all that was disrupted when good ol’ stumbly Gerald Ford dropped dead around the time we were struggling to digest our Christmas Day dim sum. Since all aspects of America’s favorite appointed president, up to and including his demise, are unmitigatedly hilarious, Wonkette has of course gone to town on this for the last week and a half, and we were hesitant to do a Gerald Ford cartoon roundup, mostly because we didn’t want the tasteless snarking to go on for longer than Ford’s presidency itself.

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Surgeons replaced yet another hip on George Herbert Walker Bush today so he can hopefully live long enough to fix whatever Junior screws up tomorrow with the “Iraq Surge to Total Defeat” plan. MORE »

We were hoping for the USS Nancy Pelosi, but it looks like Gerald Ford is getting his aircraft carrier after all.

Learn all about this stupid new development, after the jump.

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In all the pretend mourning for America’s pretend president, the comical stories of Ford’s two would-be assassin gals is probably the weirdest yet most-ignored aspect of his brief time at the White House.

Here are some fun facts: On two separate occasions just 17 days apart, two women attempted to kill Gerald Ford in California — and if not for a last-minute blunder by the women themselves, either attempt could’ve very well put Ford in the Michigan dirt 30 years ago.

Let’s meet the creepy gals, after the jump.

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* Gerald Ford: greatest President since the last one that died. [WP, NYT, USAT]
* President Bush dips his pen into the inkwell of free-market editorials. [WSJ, NYT]
* Strategy memo stolen from Rudy Giuliani’s campaign mildly shocking for the 292 million Americans that don’t live in New York City. [WP]
* Massachusetts will put gay marriage on a statewide ballot in 2008 — get ready for two years of marketing gayness to Irish-Catholics. [WP]
* No one has a clue if Barack Obama’s bong hits will become poll hits in a Presidential race. [WP]
* Democrats really, definitely launching “100-hour legislative blitz,” just as soon as the “Lets get ready to rummmble” guy shows up. [NYT]
* Hippies plan protest at Capitol tomorrow, will discuss impeachment over vegan burritos. [WP]
* African-American members of Congress from the South assume leadership positions in the House, finally. [WSJ]
* Military’s “emergency-funding request” reads like a Pentagon Christmas list. [WSJ]