Nixon, Nixon, pants on fire: Christopher Hitchens is positively scathing of this week's bumper crop of obituaries for the late Gerald Ford. In Slate, he writes what might be the most condemning indictment of the Ford administration's pardon of Richard Nixon, that White House's original sin:

You may choose, if you wish, to parrot the line that Watergate was a "long national nightmare," but some of us found it rather exhilarating to see a criminal president successfully investigated and exposed and discredited. And we do not think it in the least bit nightmarish that the Constitution says that such a man is not above the law. Ford's ignominious pardon of this felonious thug meant, first, that only the lesser fry had to go to jail. It meant, second, that we still do not even know why the burglars were originally sent into the offices of the Democratic National Committee.