There was a time, barely remembered today, when the idea of bipartisanship really seemed reasonable. There was once a kind of Republican, now driven to the verge of extinction, called the "Eisenhower Republican." Today, the equivalent beast would be called a "Moderate Democrat." The Republican Party itself has largely purged itself of Eisenhower Republicans in its radical shift to the right.

I have always been a Democrat. But even the earliest President I remember, Richard Nixon, though a crazy, paranoid, power hungry SOB, could be ideologically reasonable, as evidenced by his establishment of the EPA. But Nixon, probably unintentionally, began the decline of the Eisenhower Republican. Some of those he brought into government are the very same "barking crazy rightwingers" who have systematically been destroying our nation under Bush. That, combined with Nixon's spectacular and televised downfall, discredited the reasonable, moderate Republican. The Democrats, then more liberal than now, were ready to take advantage of Nixon's downfall, and the far right wing Republicans, then marginalized but poised to strike, were ready to begin their plans to take over the nation through lying, stealing and cheating.

One man had a small chance of saving the Eisenhower Republican: President Gerald Ford.

Gerald Ford, the last of the Eisenhower Republicans who had any chance of saving the Republican Party from the barking crazy rightwingers, has died.

Gerald Ford had been a well-respected Congressman, someone who could work with both parties to get things done. As criminal charges consumed Nixon and his administration, Gerald Ford was the last chance Republicans had of restoring respectability. Centrist, traditionalist and all around nice guy, Ford might have been the only person who could have saved the Republican Party from being taken over by extremists or lapsing into obscurity.

Pardoning Nixon and the stagflation Ford inherited from Nixon pretty much made it impossible for Ford to succeed. In the end, a moderate Democrat (Jimmy Carter) defeated Ford for President, and the right wing fringe of the Republican Party swept in to destroy the Eisenhower Republicans and take over. Those right wing nutcases have not only gone to great lengths to destroy our Constitution and to run up the biggest budget deficits in hitsory, but have also by now alienated moderate Republicans. The death of the Eisenhower branch of the Republican Party was one reason why Democrats won this year.

And with the Republican Party now nearly completely dominated by anti-democracy, right wing fools, and with Democrats winning by appealing to American moderates, Gerald Ford, at the age of 93, has died.

America has always been and should remain a two-party system. Why? Because we, as a culture, divide pretty solidly into Federalist and State's Rights camps...strict interpretation vs. loose interpretation of the Constitution... These are very real ambiguities within our system, left ambiguous by those who formed our government, and it is the give and take between these two views of government that has made our nation strong. The big danger now is that one party, the Republicans, have been taken over by a group that believes in neither of these philosophies of government except as a way of fooling voters. Instead, the barking crazy rightwingers have, in essence, thrown the whole Constitutional dichotomy out the window and have tried instituting a one-party, Soviet system of crony capitalism, corruption and war profiteering.

I have always been a Democrat and almost certainly will remain a Democrat for life. Why? Because I like the fact that the Democratic Party represents America's diversity in almost every way and, by and large, is more representative of the average American than the more elitist, pro-wealthy Republican Party has been since Harding's time. You'd have to go back before Harding before I would consider the Republican Party more representative of my views than the Democratic Party.

But I respect a healthy, moderate Republican Party, the Eisenhower Republicans, to balance the two-party American system. That is why Ford's failure to hold the line against the right wing extremists within the Republican Party is a shame and why I am saddened by Ford's death.

Since Ford's presidency, the entire track of the Republican Party has been towards more and more extremism, more and more lies, more and more greed, and more and more corruption. Almost every traditional, Eisenhower Republican ideal has been thrown out by the barking crazy rightwingers, as the three largest deficits in our history came from Reagan, the elected Bush and the current little Bush and as the idea of "small government" has been thrown out the window in a greedy rush to publicly fund the corrupt military-industrial-religious extremist complex.

I can only hope that the Republican Party can rediscover its Gerald Ford/Dwight Eisenhower side and reject the extremists who currently control their Party.