It’s tempting to see the post-Goldwater Rise of the Right as a monolithic and millennial trend whose ravages are nearly irreversible and whose decline is still not much more than a glimmer in Harry Reid’s eye.
But Sidney Blumenthal’s analysis of Gerald Ford and his differences with the GOP elite of the last 25 years offers a portrait that is compelling for at least two reasons: it’s a more believable idea than the lockstep consensus that so often appears to guide the right you love to hate; and it’s comforting because it suggests that nuance and judgment aren’t missing from politics as it is, only from politics as it’s portrayed and purveyed by so many of the powerful, including a complicit press.
Here are just a couple of clips. Read the whole piece …

[Ford’s] last testament was a final act of political finesse. Obeying the unwritten protocol of former presidents not to criticize a sitting one (a sketchy rule never upheld by Herbert Hoover or Jimmy Carter), he vouchsafed his commentary to a reporter guaranteed to publish it for maximum exposure and thus, Ford must have known, damage. Having suffered a stroke in 2000, Ford must also have known that his remarks on Bush and the others would appear while Bush was still in office and therefore of more than historical interest. …
Ford’s judgments are best understood as reflections on his own presidency. He describes Bush with a disdain he reserved previously only for one other man he believed had contempt for facts — Ronald Reagan. If he was anything, Ford was consistent, and he was consistently hostile to Reagan’s right-wing politics, which he grasped had metastasized into Bush’s radicalism. …
In April 1975, the Senate Operations Committee under the chairmanship of Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, released 14 reports on the abuse of intelligence. It chronicled “excessive executive power,” “excessive secrecy,” “avoidance of the rule of law,” “rogue” operations and even spying on domestic politics. “Whatever the theory,” the report concluded, “the fact was that intelligence activities were essentially exempted from the normal system of checks and balances. Such executive power, not founded in law or checked by Congress or the courts, contained the seeds of abuse and its growth was to be expected.”
Meanwhile, Donald Rumsfeld — moved from White House chief of staff to secretary of defense as his deputy, Dick Cheney, was promoted to the chief of staff job — created a Team B of hawks within the Pentagon who attacked the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate for supposedly underestimating the Soviet Union’s military strength. … CIA Director George H.W. Bush said that Team B set “in motion a process that lends itself to manipulation for purposes other than estimative accuracy.” Nonetheless, Rumsfeld’s inflation of the Red menace, based on faulty data, turned up the flame under Ford. Rumsfeld had his own motive: He wanted to be named vice president, a nomination that in the end went to Sen. Bob Dole, considered acceptable to Reagan.