Hearing George (I Am Lincoln) Bush laud Jerry (I’m Not a Lincoln, I’m a) Ford, you wonder if Bush hears the echo in the room. If Ford dying is a tragedy for his family and a sadness for the nation, his death must be a disaster for Bush. We will find ourselves reminded again of a president who thought he could do know wrong just because he was president. When it is quiet in the Capitol as Ford rests below the glorious rotunda, the whisper of Nixon will only grow louder.

Ford disagreed with Bush freeing the whole world if it didn’t serve a national interest. And Cheney?

“He was an excellent chief of staff. First class,” Ford said. “But I think Cheney has become much more pugnacious” as vice president. He said he agreed with former secretary of state Colin L. Powell’s assertion that Cheney developed a “fever” about the threat of terrorism and Iraq. “I think that’s probably true.”

Secretive, power driven leaders rarely get sympathy ordinary folk when they screw up. Neither the Harry Truman nor the Abraham Lincoln Bush compares himself to so frequently saw power as a goal, only as a means. The wars they fought were responses. What Bush views as spreading the fire of freedom, the rest of the world sees as aggression and occupation. Leave it to the dreamers to suggest again the world is better without Saddam and a Middle East caught in the wildfire now is somehow far better. Stupidity rarely speaks softly. The daft love nothing more than their own voices.

At some quiet moment in Ford’s funeral, someone will comment on how he was a healer. This will contrast harshly with The Occupant in Chief, The Decider who said he was a Uniter, but has more been a Divider. The nation will remember the last great divider and the last Great Divide. Nixon pacing the White House late at night, Nixon foot steps may be heard again softly then. The memory of Ford will remind us he was not a Lincoln. Some will argue Ford made a mistake pardoning Tricky Dick.

Whatever Ford did then, we were dicked. Or had been dicked. The man who tried a nation’s soul would never go on trial. Ford was in some ways a Lincoln, the Lincoln who saw a divide:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

We yearn for a greater wisdom, we strive for a lasting peace. If Ford was not a Lincoln, Bush isn’t either. But Bush might take the lesson of Ford and make a peace with his countrymen and women. We are in the bind and need a binding of wounds.

Was Ford right to pardon Nixon then? What can Bush do to bind our wounds now?