The good news: Gun Control as a major political vote-mover is pretty much not only dead, but has reversed on itself to become a Social Security-level Third Rail.  Nationwide as well as in Minnesota, only the most hardened, defeat-proof Metrocrats dare propose anything to do with gun control, and then only as a flag-showing exercise.

Conservatives have led both the moral, ethical, legal and practical pushes for defeating gun control and un-doing the four decades of damage it has caused.

But behind the self-assurance one gets when one knows one is aboard an utterly righteous cause was the nagging realization that victory couldn’t really be consolidated until the other guys – the people who’d been causing all that trouble – really believed it too.

As I was noting in the days a decade before blogs became a household term, the sea was starting to change in the early nineties.  And today – via Powerline – I notice that one of the last ramparts of orthodox gun-control is falling to the peasants; the NYTimes, the most reliable media proponent of gun control (published by Arthur Sulzberger, holder of a New York City concealed carry permit) notes the rise of a consensus among liberal legal scholars that the Second Amendment “right of the people” to keep and bear arms actually does refer to “the people” as individuals:

There used to be an almost complete scholarly and judicial consensus that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right of the states to maintain militias. That consensus no longer exists — thanks largely to the work over the last 20 years of several leading liberal law professors, who have come to embrace the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own guns.

In those two decades, breakneck speed by the standards of constitutional law, they have helped to reshape the debate over gun rights in the United States. Their work culminated in the March decision, Parker v. District of Columbia, and it will doubtless play a major role should the case reach the United States Supreme Court.

Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, said he had come to believe that the Second Amendment protected an individual right.

Tribe’s switch in allegiance – in the mid-nineties – was a huge victory for pro-liberty forces.

“My conclusion came as something of a surprise to me, and an unwelcome surprise,” Professor Tribe said. “I have always supported as a matter of policy very comprehensive gun control.”

An honest liberal lawyer.  Good to see they exist.

The piece notes the contributions of Akil Reed Amar and, especially (for me) Sanford Levinson in starting the slow swing in the legal left’s perception of the issue.  The Times piece notes Levinson’s article:

In 1989, in what most authorities say was the beginning of the modern era of mainstream Second Amendment scholarship, Professor Levinson published an article in The Yale Law Journal called “The Embarrassing Second Amendment.”

“The Levinson piece was very much a turning point,” said Mr. Henigan of the Brady Center. “He was a well-respected scholar, and he was associated with a liberal point of view politically.”

In an interview, Professor Levinson described himself as “an A.C.L.U.-type who has not ever even thought of owning a gun.”

The article – which is a fairly dense read for a layperson and a modestly-accessible read for legal scholarship – hit the anti-gunners’ stances like a pugil stick hitting a kitten.

And it still does:

Scholars who agree with gun opponents and support the collective rights view say the professors on the other side may have been motivated more by a desire to be provocative than by simple intellectual honesty.

“Contrarian positions get play,” Carl T. Bogus, a law professor at Roger Williams University, wrote in a 2000 study of Second Amendment scholarship. “Liberal professors supporting gun control draw yawns.”

Appeals to “lack of sexiness” don’t carry a lot of legal, ethical or moral weight, do they?

The Times piece sums up much of the legal history of both sides of the movement, and is well worth a read, especially as we lead up to the possible hearing of the Parker case – the tossing of the DC gun ban – in the Supreme Court:

Filing [the Parker suit] in the District of Columbia was a conscious decision, too, Mr. Levy said. The gun law there is one of the most restrictive in the nation, and questions about the applicability of the Second Amendment to state laws were avoided because the district is governed by federal law.

“We wanted to proceed very much like the N.A.A.C.P.,” Mr. Levy said, referring to that group’s methodical litigation strategy intended to do away with segregated schools.

Levy, the suit, and the sea change in even liberal outlook are battling a four-decade encrustation of ignorance:

Linda Singer, the District of Columbia’s attorney general, said the debate over the meaning of the amendment was not only an academic one.

“It’s truly a life-or-death question for us,” she said. “It’s not theoretical. We all remember very well when D.C. had the highest murder rate in the country, and we won’t go back there.”

Question, Ms. Singer:  How many of those murders were carried out by people with no criminal records?

Get back to me on that.

Tribe:

Should the case reach the Supreme Court, Professor Tribe said, “there’s a really quite decent chance that it will be affirmed.”

I’ll be watching.

Champagne may be in order.

A commenter at IMAO who claimes to be a former Iran hostage speaks out:

As my screenname indicates, I can speak with Complete Moral Authority ™ on this issue.

On the day of the takeover, the Marines were outnumbered at least 1000 to 1. We held the consulate and the communications vault for over 12 hours, helping to destroy equipment and classified material. We were under STRICT orders not to fire our weapons or pop gas grenades (too late for that last one..hee, hee, hee). We were eventually told that we were on or own and to make a break for it. The monkeys even put one of the diplomats in front of the comm vault peep eye with a pistol to their head and threatened to kill them unless the door was opened. It wasn’t and they didn’t. Once all the material was destroyed the doors were opened and they all got the crap beat out of them.

When we were first taken, the Iranians took us into a room individually and asked us to sign a statement denouncing the US policy in Iran, Israel, the Shah, etc. The Marines signed with names such as Michael Mouse, Chesty Puller, Dan Daly (google the last two…Marine Corps legends), Harry Butz, etc.

Read the whole thing.

By way of reading Emily’s birthday post at TXP,  I noted that Saturday was the 39th anniversary of an obscure death that I remember almost as clearly as that of Martin Luther King, two days earlier…:

Motor racing world champion Jim Clark was killed in a car crash during a race.

Jimmy Clark was a “champion” in the same sense that Tiger Woods is a “Good Golfer”.

Perhaps the greatest Formula 1 driver ever, he passed the unbreakable records of Fangio and Nuvolare in only eight years of professional racing.   Ayrton Senna and Jackie Stewart both passed his win record – but both of them raced longer careers and busier schedules.

A natural talent, Clark’s record in F1 may be equalled, but there’s never be another.

And there’ll never be a car as cool as the 1.5l 1965 Lotus F1…

While Scots in America don’t have a national holiday that enshrines mass public drunkenness and projectile vomiting, we do have – for the last nine years, anyway – Tartan Day.

According to Wikipedia…:

…took root in the United States and since 1998, the date of April 6 has been officially recognised by the United States Senate as a celebration of the contribution made by generations of Scots-Americans to the foundation and prosperity of modern America.

The date is significant as it commemorates the signing of the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320, the first known formal Declaration of independence. Not only was the United States Declaration of Independence modelled on that document, but almost half of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were of Scottish descent and the Governors in 9 of the original 13 States were of Scottish ancestry.

So tack a “Mac-” onto the front of your name, quaff a couple shots of Laphroaig, paint your face blue and moon your boss today – he can take your job, be he canna take your freedom!

Play bagpipe music, or at least Big Country, Simple Minds and the Proclaimers, in your cube.

Talk like Sean Connery. Eat a burrito, but call it haggis just to see the reactions you get.

Save a nickel, rather than spending it.

It’s Tartan Day. You deserve it.

I heare that Kirk Kerkorian is bidding a chunk of money to buy Chrysler. 

Yaaaawwwwn.  Whatever.

But hearing that during WWII Kerkorian flew one of the coolest airplanes ever?

Now that is interesting!

…what surprises me more:  that some teachers and schools in the UK are softpedalling teaching about the Holocaust and the Crusades to avoid offending Moslems…:

Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Governmentbacked study has revealed.

It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.

There is also resistance to tackling the 11th century Crusades – where Christians fought Muslim armies for control of Jerusalem – because lessons often contradict what is taught in local mosques.

[A British government study] found some teachers are dropping courses covering the Holocaust at the earliest opportunity over fears Muslim pupils might express anti-Semitic and anti-Israel reactions in class. …[another school] deliberately avoided teaching the Crusades at Key Stage 3 (11- to 14-year-olds) because their balanced treatment of the topic would have challenged what was taught in some local mosques.”

…or that any schools in the Western World teach any of this stuff in the first place.

I’m not aware of either of my kids being taught about the Crusades at all, or anything about the Holocaust at more than the  most cursory possible level. 

Well, not in school anyway.

25 years ago, Great Britain didn’t cotton to Britons, or British territory, being fodder for thugs and terrorists.  It was 25 years ago today that Argentina invaded the Falklands.  A group of 85 British Royal Marines fought back against 1,000 Argentine Marines and Commandos:

As the [Argentine Marine] LVTP column passed the old airfield, they came in range of [British Royal Marine] Lt. Bill Trollope’s section; he gave the order to open fire.  The LVTPs were each armed with a 12.7mm machine gun that made these amphibious troop carriers a formidable threat to Lt. Trollope and his small section of Marines. Marine Gibbs, armed with a 66mm anti-tank rocket launcher took aim at the lead Argentine APC and opened fire, but missed. An  84mm Carl Gustav round fired by Marine Brown found its mark and stopped the lead LVTP dead. The Argentine marines inside the LVTP were unhurt and quickly evacuated the vehicle. The other Argentine LVTPs now spread out and opened up with their 12.7mm machine guns on Trollope’s section positions. Lt. Trollope ordered a withdrawal back to Government house, happy that at least one of the Argentines APC would not give the Marines any problems in the near future.

Some Brits remember.

…26 years ago, I was unloading a bass amp from a pickup truck outside Jamestown High School.  The school’s stage band had just played a noon-hour gig at a Rotary Club meeting, and was coming back to school.  It was a warm, pleasant March day, my senior year of high school, and I really wasn’t interested in going back to class.  I was much more interested in chatting up this really hot trumpet player…

Suddenly, someone said out the door – “President Reagan’s been shot“.

I was still a Democrat back then, and had been very nervous about Reagan winning the presidency; I figured he’d reinstitute a draft and have us all fighting in Saudi Arabia before I could get to college.  I didn’t cheer on getting the news, of course (someone in the band did, although I can’t remember and don’t care who it was), while others groaned; to most of the kids, it didn’t matter that much. 

Still, Reagan’s behavior during and after the crisis helped accelerate my slide to the right. 

More on that later…

…when your laxative kicks in?

Learned Foot remembers his grandfather:

Most people will leave behind a shoebox full of pictures to remind subsequent generations of their mark upon the world. But for a precious few – whose numbers are dwindling rapidly – the world itself is the evidence for the mark they left on it.

The whole thing is worth a read.

Comment-section gadfly gadflea gadmite gadamecium RickDFL wrote:

On behalf of the younger generation can I just say that watching all you old baby boomers re-fight the war protests of your youth, only this time without the cool soundtrack and hot women, is really boring.

I pointed out that I’ve banned people for less than calling me a baby boomer. His response:

From wikipedia, “There is little agreement as to the exact beginning and end dates of the baby boom, but it is commonly identified as starting in 1946 and ending in 1964.” So, if you were 38 on 9/11 2001, you were born at the tail end of the baby boom. Hate to break it to you.

Well. Wikipedia says so. I guess that settles it!

Rick – didja catch that whole “there is little agreement” bit at the beginning of your pullquote? Slapping an arbitrary date on something that subjective is inherently unclear and lazy.

Fortunately, that’s why I’m here.

Baby boomers were the children of the World War II generation. While they largely started having their kids nine months after VJ day, and kept right on breeding into the early sixties, their Boomerhood was a factor of being children of the “Greatest Generation”.

On VJ day, my dad was nine and my mom was five. They might have been old enough to fight in the Volkssturm, but not for the US. Demographically, socially and morally, I am not a baby boomer. Never have been, never will be.

But – and again, with apologies to Jeff Foxworthy – here’s a little quiz to help you decide what generation you really belong to.

You Might Not Be A Baby Boomer If…: you have more Clash, Springsteen and Sex Pistols than Beatles and Stones in your music collection.

You Might Not Be A Baby Boomer If…: you have never used the term “Camelot” unironically to refer to anything after the 13th Century. Or if the word “Camelot” to you means dancing knights who push the pram a lot, rather than Jackie Onassis.

You Might Not Be A Baby Boomer If…: the Teheran Hostage Crisis is more prominent in your memory than Kent State.

You Might Not Be A Baby Boomer If…: you think Dennis Miller was a better Weekend Update host than Chevy Chase.

You Might Not Be A Baby Boomer If…: “Quadrophonic” and “Eight Track” mean the same thing as “Edsel”.

You Might Not Be A Baby Boomer If…: “Woodstock” was a bird.

Carry on.

It’s Reagan’s Birthday today:

I’ll be taking the kids out tonight, talking a little bit about what Reagan’s presidency meant to their future (all of it good), as well as the lies that their schools have told about the era, and what to tell to the teachers who will no doubt diss merrily away.

Oh, yeah – and jellybeans at work!

Happy Reagan’s Birthday, America!

(more…)

Of late, it’s become important to some lefties to try to debunk – 30-odd years after the event – the notion that anti-war protesters ever spat upon returning Vietnam vets.

Jack Shafer in Slate continues what is, apparently, a crusade for him:

The myth of the spat-upon Vietnam veteran refuses to die. Despite Jerry Lembcke’s debunking book from 1998, Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, and my best efforts to publicize his work, the press continues to repeat the fables as fact.

Earlier this month, Newsweek resuscitated the vet-spit myth in a dual profile of John McCain and Chuck Hagel. Newsweek reports: “Returning GIs were sometimes jeered and even spat upon in airports; they learned to change quickly into civilian clothes.”

Nexis teems with such allegations of spat-upon vets and even includes testimonials by those who claim to have been gobbed upon. But Lembcke—a Vietnam vet himself—cites his own research and that of other academics to assert that he has never uncovered a single news story documenting such an incident.

Lembke’s book asserts that, since he never uncovered a news story about veterans getting spat upon, it must never have happened – that it’s all an urban legend.
It’s possible.

It’s also a very odd standard of evidence; presence in the news media is the threshold of truth.

Lembcke writes:

If spitting on veterans had occurred all that frequently, surely some veteran or soldier would have called it to the attention of the press at the time. … Indeed, we would imagine that news reporters would have been camping in the lobby of the San Francisco airport, cameras in hand, just waiting for a chance to record the real thing—if, that is, they had any reason to believe that such incidents might occur.

Maybe. Quite possible, in fact. Urban legends do take on lives of their own.

But let’s tackle Lembke’s – and Shafer’s – assertions; that…:

1. …if it didn’t pop up in Lexis/Nexis, it probably never happened
2. …some intrepid reporter would surely have been camping out waiting to verify the story

Picture the scenario; you’re just back from ‘Nam. You’ve spent the past year slogging through jungle, dodging booby traps, getting into firefights at “inside-the-phonebooth” range, patrolling and ambushing and sitting up at night watching for infiltrators. Then you fly home. Some fly-eaten piece of vermin spits at or on you. What are you going to do? Go to the police, much less a news reporter? In those circumstances, does it occur to you to take official action over spit?

As to the media of the day – the idea that an old school editor would assign anyone to stake out the airport looking for people spitting on people beggars my imagination, but I suppose anything’s possible.

But as I said, it’s entirely possible that the spit stories are urban legends. To dismiss the claims (as so many leftybloggers are curiously racing to do today) ignores the reason urban legends occur in the first place.

Then, starting around 1980, members of the Vietnam War generation began sharing the tales, which Lembcke calls “urban myths.” As with most urban myths, the details of the spat-upon vets vary slightly from telling to telling, while the basic story remains the same. The protester almost always ambushes the soldier in an airport (not uncommonly the San Francisco airport), after he’s just flown back to the states from Asia. The soiled soldier either slinks away or does nothing.

I love the scare italics around “ambushes”; you’re a pencil-necked, drug-addled piece of yippie vermin; you’re going to cruise around the airport carrying a “Will Spit On Vets For Patchouli” sign, chasing after guys who’ve spent the last year fighting a war?

Yippies were dumb, but they weren’t suicidal. They weren’t going to all that trouble dodging the draft just to get their brains beaten in by some Marine who’d had a bad week.

But I digress. Urban legends happen for a reason. They often reflect some underlying part of a society’s, or group’s, zeitgeist.

I remember clearly as if it were yesterday the news coverage of some “peace” activist shortly before the Vietnam POWs came home. “They were never tortured! You can see,they’re all in great condition!”, she blathered. And yes, the hippies and protesters attacked soldiers as individuals as well as an institution.

And those critics – those who slandered those who fought – went on to positions of great power…:

Call it “rhetorical spit”. 

Even if no single yippie ever actually spat on a returning veteran, the figurative spitting – the endless “babykiller” references and John Kerry’s “Jinjiss Kahn” references being good places to start – would provide fertile, understandable ground for a more direct-sounding “legend”. 

Jimmy Carter started my swing to the right.  Seeing his incomparable stupidity as a kid in the seventies, I started, slowly, to question the Democrat-leaning worldview I’d been brought up in.

Over the years, he’s shown himself to be a deeply loathsome man.

“But how can you say that?”, ask those who haven’t scratched beneath his surface.  “He works for peace!  He builds houses!”

Yeah, and he has an odd sense of right and wrong:

Former President Jimmy Carter once complained there were “too many Jews” on the government’s Holocaust Memorial Council, Monroe Freedman, the council’s former executive director, told WND in an exclusive interview.

Freedman, who served on the council during Carter’s term as president, also revealed a noted Holocaust scholar who was a Presbyterian Christian was rejected from the council’s board by Carter’s office because the scholar’s name “sounded too Jewish.”

Whatever it takes to give this nation the sense of collective shame it should have for having elected this vile little hamster, I’ll do it.

Gary Miller at TvM quotes Bob Novak in noting some potential good news:

The provision, one of the more absurd consequences of the campaign finance reform craze of 2002, bars any mention of a candidate’s name or the broadcast of his image except by an FEC-regulated political committee. Groups such as Wisconsin Right to Life are barred from buying ads mentioning them.

In this case, the group wanted to air ads in 2004 urging Wisconsinites to contact their senators — Democrats Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl — to tell them to support judicial confirmations. But Feingold was up for re-election, therefore campaign law shielded him from being mentioned on television by any group that does not follow FEC regulations for gathering contributions and filing disclosure forms.

The new court – which previously ratified parts of the speech rationing law – shows promise of reversing the previous court’s decisions.

Which would be the just about the first positive fallout from the ’04 elections we’d have seen.

Remeber during the first four years of the Bush Administration?  When every Democrat, including the ones who’d spent the Clinton era chuckling at the crazies in the Libertarian Party, thought concern for civil liberties (other those to abortion, making poop sculptures and exposing oneself in public) was the mark of tinfoil-hatted crazies?

 Remember how the minute John Ashcroft was sworn in, they became strict constructionists…no, that’s not accurate.  They became not-very-discerning absolutists? 

And when word got out that a group of soldiers mistreated a group of Iraqi detainees, Liberty was the word of the day?

They must have woken up.  The fantasy is over; the leopard’s spots are visible again.  The Democrats want to put free speech on a leash and make it bark like a dog:

Over the weekend, the National Conference for Media Reform was held in Memphis, TN, with a number of notable speakers on hand for the event. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) made an surprise appearance at the convention to announce that he would be heading up a new House subcommittee which will focus on issues surrounding the Federal Communications Commission.

I can hear it now:  “Oh, it’s just that nutbar Kucinich”.

Not at all.  Regulating free speech (by conservatives) is close to the heart for the left for almost two decades, ever since the Fairness Doctrine was repealed, opening the way for conservative alternatives to the left’s smothering hegemony in the media.  Hillary! Clinton and John Kerry have both floated the idea.

Kucinich’s push isn’t the ravings of a crackpot; it’s a trial balloon floated by someone who can’t do the Democrat mainstream any harm.  Their focus groups can poke and prod and see if the issue can move in from the fringe in time for the election.

In addition to media ownership, the committee is expected to focus its attention on issues such as net neutrality and major telecommunications mergers. Also in consideration is the “Fairness Doctrine,” which required broadcasters to present controversial topics in a fair and honest manner. It was enforced until it was eliminated in 1987.

Kucinich said in his speech that “We know the media has become the servant of a very narrow corporate agenda” and added “we are now in a position to move a progressive agenda to where it is visible.”

What Kucinich means, of course, is that he (and the new Democrat majority for whom he speaks) want to explore the idea of using the government to reassert control of the media. 

Here, though, is where the real agenda is betrayed:

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps was also on hand at the conference and took broadcasters to task for their current content, speaking of “too little news, too much baloney passed off as news. Too little quality entertainment, too many people eating bugs on reality TV. Too little local and regional music, too much brain-numbing national play-lists.” Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein also spoke at the event.

Of course, Mr. Copps doesn’t note how much Americans’ news and entertainment bypasses the traditional broadcast and print media, today.  The market has been bleeding people away from newspapers, network newscasts, even the Big Three’s entertainment programming for decades…

…and have been proving Copps’ thesis to be void and without merit, lately, inasmuch as we are, right now, in the golden age of the broadcast TV drama.  The networks have had to respond to cable and the internet; some of that response has been Fear Factor, true, but great drama, comedy and writing (24, House, Scrubs, Lost and many more) are all over the place, like never before.

But don’t be fooled.  This isn’t about Fear Factor, or about quality at all; the FCC held full sway during the “glory” years of Laverne and Shirley, Three’s Company and The Love Boat. 

No.  This is about silencing talk radio, neutering conservative blogs, and re-homogenizing all American news content.

If you are a conservative – or a liberal with any integrity – you need to call your congresspeople and set them straight about this.

And if you call yourself a “liberal” but you support this, then you need a new, more honest label.

How about “authoritarian thug”?

(more…)

Hitchens on Keith “X” Ellison’s “Jefferson’s Qu’ran” stunt (and the ignorance so many bring to the flap):

As to the invocation of Jefferson, we know that when he and James Madison first proposed the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom (the frame and basis of the later First Amendment to the Constitution) in 1779, the preamble began, “Well aware that Almighty God hath created the mind free.” Patrick Henry and other devout Christians attempted to substitute the words “Jesus Christ” for “Almighty God” in this opening passage and were overwhelmingly voted down. This vote was interpreted by Jefferson to mean that Virginia’s representatives wanted the law “to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahomedan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.” Quite right, too, and so far so good, even if the term Mahomedan would not be used today, and even if Jefferson’s own private sympathies were with the last named in that list.

And, moreso, if Jefferson would have been rightly nauseated by what so many of Ellison’s supporters at CAIR stand for.
(Via Chris at Buddha Patriot)

I was wondering when the European population gap was going to come to this:

When her water broke early on New Years Eve, Julia Gotschlich was mainly thinking about the imminent birth of her second child. But she couldnt help worrying about family finances, too.

She and her husband stood to lose out on more than $13,200 if the baby arrived before midnight, when Germanys generous new family benefits took effect – part of a government effort to raise one of the lowest birthrates in Europe.

Births in Germany dropped 4 percent in 2005 from the previous year, according to figures from the Federal Statistics Agency, to around 690,000. Thats the lowest since World War II and lagging even 1946, when 922,000 babies were born even as the country lay in ruins.

A recent government study forecast that Germanys population will drop by as much as 16 percent by 2050, from the current 82.4 million to as little as 69 million. That could hurt the economy by sapping the work force – and undermine the state pension system.

Not to mention leaving the country being assimilated into the Moslem world.

Will money do what social vitality can’t?

As noted many times in this space, I oppose the death penalty for exactly one reason; the likelihood, across 50 states and thousands of counties and 300 million people, of executing an innocent person.  As long as any chance of this exists, along with any acceptable alternate approach, capital punishment is to me morally unacceptable.

Presuming there’s a chance of innocence.

Which, I think almost everyone agrees isn’t the case with Hussein.

And I also usually eschew the ghoulish notion of the Dead Pool.  But for Hussein, and in honor of my Kurdish friends who will no doubt be celebrating soon, let’s do it.

Pick the date and time of Hussein’s death.  Leave it in the comments. 

I pick 3PM Central time tomorrow.  Not that I think it’s the most likely time, but these things seem to happen whenever the NARN gets off the air.

Your turn.

Chevy Chase on the the guy who launched was the reason for  his career:

Chase, 63, was an original cast member on the trend-setting late-night comedy television show “Saturday Night Live” and frequently opened the show pretending to be Ford stumbling and falling. The parody in 1975-6 helped reinforce a popular image about Ford’s clumsiness, even though the president had been a star athlete in college.

Chase proceeded to make that (and Fletch, which was basically the Ford bit tacked onto a private eye) his whole career.

Was he grateful?  Well, eventually:

“He had never been elected period, so I never felt that he deserved to be there to begin with,” the actor said about Ford, who died on Tuesday at age 93. “That was just the way I felt then as a young man and as a writer and a liberal.”

“Later on we became friends and he was a very, very sweet man,” Chase said in a telephone interview from a Colorado ski resort. “He took my wife and I on a whole lovely trip through Grand Rapids to show us where he had been as a child and what not. We kept in touch and he was just a terrific guy.

Wow.  Are Republicans supposed to be “terrific guys?”