Good Riddance William Safire. [View All]

[Cyrano]

William Safire has been a columnist for the NY Times for 30 years and yesterday, he wrote his last column. (The Times gave him the entire Op-Ed page.)

Safire is not Limbaugh, or Hannity, or O'Reilly, or Coulter. He's more intelligent, thoughtful, nuanced and human. Which makes his being a right-wing conservative pundit all the more puzzling and unforgivable. Any rational human being who can hold the beliefs Safire holds is beyond my comprehension.

For the life of me, I'll never understand people like Safire. He wasn't being "paid off" to peddle the conservative crap he endorsed for 30 years. He genuinely believed it and still does. (If you don't know, Safire was a Nixon speech writer who wrote Spiro Agnew's famous line, "Nattering nabobs of negativism.")

Can it be that there are intelligent human beings who are missing some unidentified gene or chromosome who buy into the Republican shit that's been spouted from Herbert Hoover through King George the Second? I don't know. Nor will I ever understand people like William Safire.

All this having been said, Safire was never a mean-spirited Neanderthal in the Limbaugh/Hannity/O'Reilly/Coulter mold. Nonetheless, his world view and beliefs were probably more damaging, because they were coming from someone with a brain and a respected platform (the New York Times Op-Ed page).