Chaz, in the spirit of Safire, I had to search some more on the Agnew/Buchanan/Safire issue. I think Safire's written about it himself in his language column, but that's not on the Times web site. I did come up with one apparent acknowledgement, though, from nattering nabob Morton Kondrake, in a review of a Safire book.
EXCEPT (so far) for poetry and drama, there doesn't seem to be anything in the realm of word and image that William Safire can't do, and do well. As a P.R. man, he arranged the 1959 Nixon-Khrushchev kitchen debate. As a White House speechwriter, he wrote Vice President Spiro Agnew's blast at "nattering nabobs of negativism." As a probing, punning pundit for The New York Times, he won a Pulitzer Prize. He is the nation's leading pop lexicographer. He has written, co-written or edited 23 books, including an enthralling historical novel on Lincoln, a political exegesis of Job and an anthology of great speeches.
Most of the other things on the web credit Buchanan and Safire together as Agnew's wordsmiths (see cgi.pathfinder.com, panix.com That last is good for this:
So you're Spiro Agnew. You're totally unqualified but you've just been elected Vice-President of the United States of America. What now–a trip to Disneyland? No! Attack the “vicars of vacillation,” the “pusillanimous pussyfooters,” and “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.” Then go after the “nattering nabobs of negativism.” The “ideological eunuchs,” the “rad-libs,” the “decadent few,” the “effete corps of of impudent snobs,” and “the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.”
All this alliterative aggression was an amazing advance for the candidate whose quotidian quotes were racist rants. Agnew came to national notice as Nixon's number two, attacking “polacks” and a “fat jap.” He once said that “once you've seen one ghetto you've seen them all.” He had speechwriters Pat Buchanan and William Safire to thank for his phenomenally phobic phraseology.
Being a fan of alliteration myself, I couldn't resist that quote. But here's another one directly crediting Safire:
Mr. Safire first became famous as a speechwriter for the Nixon White House; he put the onomatopoetic phrase "nattering nabobs of negativism" in Spiro Agnew's repertoire. (http://american-politics.com/092998Safire.html)
More topically, that last link brings us back to the present, in a matter of speaking.
But Mr. Safire has done many things undemonstrative of "good character." Case in point: He and The Wall Street Journal's John Fund wrote incredibly vicious tales about Clinton White House aide Vincent Foster. When Foster, a deeply honorable man prone to depression and low self-esteem, shot himself as a result of these attacks, one would expect that persons of "character" would feel shame and remorse at having hounded a man to suicide.
But that wasn't Fund -- or Safire's -- reaction.
Immediately after Foster's death, they began passing around malicious and false rumors alleging that Foster was murdered, supposedly under the Clintons' orders. The conservative movement took up the smear, most notably arch-wacko Pittsburgh press mogul Richard Mellon Scaife -- who, incidentally, is the sugar daddy for much of the right wing, including morals czar Bill Bennett and GOP mouthpiece Ann Coulter. He also bankrolled The American Spectator (and their now notorious "Arkansas Project" to dig dirt on Clinton) until the right-wing organ published a damning review of a book by conspiracy nut Christopher Ruddy -- a pet columnist of Scaife who promoted the Foster "murder" rumors in Scaife's Pittsburgh Tribune-Gazette.
Four separate investigations, including Ken Starr's Whitewater OIC, disproved these rumors utterly -- but that doesn't stop the right wing from continuing to flogging them.
For his vileness towards Vince Foster, both before and after Foster's death, Safire has forfeited all right to call himself a man of character. But his breathtaking baseness doesn't end there.
In a recent New York Timescolumn, Safire tried hinting that there was more dirt on the Clintons that Starr had "failed" to uncover, particularly in the area of Whitewater. Of course, Mr. Safire conveniently forgot (or is it blithely overlooked) that two Whitewater probes conducted prior to Starr's Whitewater OIC exonerated the Clintons -- and that probes in the other faux-scandals, "Filegate" and "Travelgate", cleared the Clintons of wrongdoing in those areas as well.
But it was when he repeated the GOP-authored China-technology-transfer smear that he looked truly ridiculous.
Even as Safire's China-missile insinuations hit the street, his ideological brothers in the House were quietly debunking this latest anti-Clinton falsehood! It was announced last week that a special House investigation found absolutely no evidence that President Clinton illegally facilitated the transfer of sensitive missile technology to China. The House Select Committee on China trade found no impeachable offenses and has not referred any of its findings to the House Judiciary Committee. The investigation will continue until the end of the year, but even the Republicans on the committee admit that there is no likelihood of finding any Clintonian wrongdoing in this matter.
Left unspoken was an important admission: the policy of dealing with China on missile matters was started by Ronald Reagan and continued by George Bush. Face it -- wouldn't it look awfully strange for the House GOP to bash Clinton for pursuing Republican policy?
The words of the Gospel ring as true for Republicans as for everyone else: Before you point out a speck in your neighbor's eye, you'd better remove the plank from your own.
Plank, log, what's the difference. I'm sure the Rev. Pilch has the correct theological explanation here. Anyway, it's all about integrity, or morality, or character, or "truth and justice", or something. Safire, of course, continues to hold forth in that notoriously biased organ of the eastern liberal elite, the NYT. Who did kill Vince Foster? |
