“He had a healthy respect for political give-and-take, he loved language and he was a worthy adversary for liberals,” said Eric Alterman, the writer and professor. “It’s because he took the ideas of the other side seriously. He wanted to win an argument, and he wanted to win it fairly.”

Mr. Safire was a Op-Ed columnist for 33 years before he settled into a quieter life writing solely about words and language in the pages of The New York Times Magazine. (He started that gig way back in 1979.) Though he certainly wasn’t shy about his strongly right-of-center views, particularly when it came to Bill Clinton, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Iraq war, Mr. Safire had a certain something that made him a good opponent.

“He took The Times seriously, which I don’t think many in the right-wing media do,” said Eric Boehlert, writer and senior fellow at Media Matters. “I don’t think his fact-checking was that great, but he did have a Times platform, and that Times platform meant something more to him.”

Mr. Boehlert was one of Safire’s critics. In a 2004 Salon article headlined “William Safire’s Dubious Legacy,” he wrote: “Safire has been wrong more times than you can count, yet the instances in which he has acknowledged his errors in print can probably be calculated on two hands. (He’s written well over 2,000 columns.)”

But five years later, with conservative yo-yos all over television, Mr. Boehlert concedes Mr. Safire was at least reasonable.

“The conservatives today—Glenn Beck, Limbaugh, Fox News—don’t have any adult supervision anymore, and Safire played an adult role while playing a partisan,” he said.

“He had a regime of argumentation that was smart,” said Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation.

“There was an intelligence to his columns, which defined him,” she continued. “He was certainly pugnacious in ways I disagreed with, but he would do things like take on Bush’s civil liberties, and he had this burst of contrarian spirit. It’s not visible enough these days in a lot of writing.”

No one seemed to like what he did to Bill Clinton, but you couldn’t help but respect what he did … at least a little.

“During the Clinton years and then during Bush’s first term, he was seen as one of the leading voices of the conservative movement, but today you have to sign off on the idea that Obama is a communist or a Nazi or a racist, and I can’t imagine he would have signed off on any of that,” said Mr. Boehlert.

“Sometimes the facts changed his opinions, which is pretty rare among opinion writers,” said Mr. Alterman. “Plus, he was a wonderful writer. He was a great role model for anyone taking writing seriously.”

jkoblin@observer.com

Mr. Safire was not the father of a movement like Mr. Kristol, but he was often the clever public voice, a reporter-turned-speechwriter with an eye toward playing the press. It was Mr. Safire, after all, who staged the Kitchen Debate between Nixon and Khrushchev, and Mr. Safire who captured it in a widely distributed photograph. He wrote the lines that made Spiro Agnew sound clever: "nattering nabobs of negativism" and "hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history." As a columnist, he always seemed to enjoy himself in print, whether he was forcing the resignation of President Carter's budget director, or inviting a physical threat from President Clinton (after Mr. Safire wrote that Ms. Clinton was a "congenital liar").

Maybe it's because Mr. Safire was a Times man for so long--he had penned the On Language column for the magazine ever since Jimmy Carter was president--or maybe because he-would-have-wanted-it-this-way, the paper had some fun with Mr. Safire's obituary.

There were columns on blogosphere blargon, tarnation-heck euphemisms, dastardly subjunctives and even Barack and Michelle Obama’s fist bumps. And there were Safire “rules for writers”: Remember to never split an infinitive. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. Avoid clichés like the plague. And don’t overuse exclamation marks!!

It wouldn't have been completely surprising if Mr. Safire had shared the by-ine. After all, he was committed to working until his last moments even as he fought pancreatic cancer. Yesterday's On Language column said he would be "on hiatus for a few weeks," and his last op-ed in 2005 ended thus:

"When you're through changing, learning, working to stay involved - only then are you through. 'Never retire.'"

This time, we're meant to look at the deeper meaning of a new technology that's bringing people closer together, changing the face of advertising and marketing, and even helping make the world a better, safer place.

Per The New York Times:

So wrote William Safire about CB Radio on June 17, 1976. (Fun fact: That editorial ran about a month shy of John McCain's 40th birthday!) But who doesn't catch the whiff of sure-to-date badly exuberance when reading contemporary journalists falling all over themselves to breathlessly report on Twitter?

If it seems like every week there's a new story on how great Twitter is, that's because every week there is a new story about how great Twitter is. Seriously, isn't it time we declare Twitter fatigue ('fatwigue') and put this new toy in the same cupboard as Usenet, (Blue-) "Toothing," and Friedster?

Yesterday The New York Times Magazine's Clive Thompson offered "Brave New World of Digital Intimacy," in which he reads the tweets in the coal mine (and looks deep into the face of Facebook's News Feed feature) and sees:

Yes, they are. They are helping companies better serve you—and sell you—according to BusinessWeek's Rachel King, who reported "How Companies Use Twitter to Bolster Their Brands" from September 6th.

Twitter's not just changing advertising and serving business interests, it's changing democracy and the way we're electing this year's president according to The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz who filed "Political Coverage That's All a-Twitter" on August 26th, in which he claimed "Tweets may be particularly well suited for highly scripted political conventions, where what passes for news is anecdotal and can evaporate within minutes."

But you already knew technology was changing elections, right? As The Times' Mr. Safire wrote in 32 years ago:

Or he could just Tweet it.

Lately I've noticed where Jewish writers can't talk openly about the Israel lobby, but resort to a similar sort of code. Yesterday in the New York Times, David Brooks...

spoke of an emerging political realignment that will transform the categories of right and left. On one side are populist nationalists, he said, whose foreign policy goals are "realist." On the other are "elitists": "progressive globalists" whose foreign policy is "multilateral interventionist."

This is code. Brooks's political radar is as usual keen, but he obviously has in mind Walt and Mearsheimer, the two realists who have made an explosive critique of the Israel lobby. When the realists analyze our foreign policy, from Fukuyama to Brzezinski to Walt, they talk about Israel/Palestine, and the separation of American interest from Israel's. Brooks should deal with this argument openly, and engage the question. What he's done here seems intellectually dishonest.

Brooks's predecessor, William Safire, was open about Israel's interests, and his devotion to them. Indeed, such frankness used to be the norm among neoconservatives. Bush aide Elliott Abrams wrote nine years ago that "To many American Jews, [support for Israel] became the essence of their understanding of their own Jewishness." Now that support for Israel has become acutely politicized—and implicated in the Iraq disaster—you never see that sort of frankness among the neocons. The more power they have, the more nuanced and opaque they have become. Brooks is a journalist. He should be clearing away such mystification, not adding to it.

This goes under the heading of My Jewish Problem, because it is a reflection of my own discomfort as a progressive small-d democrat amid the mainstream Jewish presence in public life—specifically, my tribe's ascension into the establishment alongside its inability to engage the political questions that arise from that power. I know where the discomfort comes from: persecution, antisemitism, and the Holocaust. But failing to address that presence and power directly, when questions are raised directly, is unbefitting of a democracy. There is a way to discuss this stuff without abandoning Israel or having pogroms in Iowa.

Citing Paul's claim that increased availability of internet pornography has changed the way men relate to—and have sex with—the real women in their lives, Sohn concludes:

Not an actual trend? Why, just this past May, New York Magazine ran a story (its third in two years, incidentally) with the unambiguous subhead, Online Porn is Changing (Read 'Destroying') Relationships. In that piece, the author claimed:

The author of that unimpeachable bit of pop sociology? Amy Sohn.

Related: A quick Nexis search reveals that Sohn's review marked the debut of the term "bukkake" in the pages of the Times. Expect a William Safire 'On Language' column shortly.

—Matt Haber

I have learned not to relax, not to smile, not to expect any enemy within or without to die or fade away. I know that the settlers on the West Bank and their fundamentalist supporters will place such pressure on the peace process that the deal may collapse. I know that the Arab fanatics will try everything in their power to keep peace from their door because its arrival would signal the end of their dream: a perfect and total return to a Judenrien land of olive groves and minarets. I know that the politicians of the Jewish right will play on our ancient and recent fears of betrayal; "never again," they will whisper in our ears and stir our nightmares out of sleep. I know that real security concerns will mingle with bogey men and that I and most other ordinary people will not be, cannot be, quite clear-will planes with radar protect the borders? How long will it take for Israel to mobilize against an invader? What of scuds and poison gas, what of anthrax smuggled into the King David Hotel in a silver chafing dish? Is Syria apt to cross the Golan and eat up little Jewish children learning their alphabet in Tel Aviv or will everyone stay put and tend to their own gardens (which need some tending indeed)?

Years ago, those of us who thought we ought to talk to Yasir Arafat were considered traitors to our people. In Israel you could be jailed for meeting with the enemy. Years ago, the return of land for peace, compromise with the Palestinians (who were said to not even exist, a fabricated peoplehood serving the purpose of the hostile Arab brotherhood), was considered weak-headed, anti-Jewish. Then, gradually it became clear. If you occupied Lebanon, you lost men in Lebanon. If you insisted on all the land, you could never have peace in any of it. If you denied your neighbor some part of the orchard, he would forever try to set fire to the whole. The idea of peace, of compromise, of building bridges of trade and education between the peoples took hold. But not such hold that peace has been achieved-not yet.

The same folks who supported the most stiff-necked, give-them-nothing approach are still at it, trying to convince the rest of us that giving an inch will lose us the entire body; that the dangers of compromise are so great that we ought to retreat behind our walls and wait for the Arabs to fold their tents and quietly slip away. William Safire has all but accused Ehud Barak of cooperating in betraying Israel's interests to aid Al Gore's bid for the American presidency. He asks that "Israel seek evidence of Arab trustworthiness before rolling its security dice." The problem is that, as in a dance, if one partner stiffens, the other must also. If one partner steps on the toes of the other, the dance is over. Palestinians unsatisfied, outlaws among nations, will continue terrorism, proving in doing so that they are not trustworthy, so the cycle of violence will continue unbroken. The longer peace waits, the more acts of terrorism will occur, reinforcing the idea that we cannot have peace because of terrorism. What a stupid bind.

The only hope is not to be a shtarker , as Mr. Safire proudly labels himself, "hard-line, insufferably resolute," but to take a risk, to take a leap, to offer an open hand where tear gas has failed. Ariel Sharon wants no Arab-controlled sections of Jerusalem, no Palestinian state. He expects that history will wash the Palestinians away to a place where the dinosaurs still roam-this is not tough thinking, but wishful unrealistic thinking. Strength, shtarker strength, does not always lie in denying others their place. Mr. Safire's is a schoolboy version of the strong guy, not one for the real world in which you have to be nimble to protect your own back, gain what you want and yet live among other people whose well-being will, must, does, impact on yours. To be a shtarker in certain situations is to be no more than the playground bully-"Nah, nah, na, nah na, I'm bigger than you are." Mr. Safire implies that those of us who support Mr. Barak in his efforts are soft-headed, the opposite of shtarkers . I am not irresolute or naïve or ready to roll over and die. I simply believe that a fight to the death is out of the question because it will be my death too. I believe that friendship and cooperation and imagining the other is a sign of maturity and strength. Nationalism is a good thing for Jews, but we can learn from the nasty nationalisms and religious divisions of Europe in the last century and make our state balanced, humane, long lasting, without 100 years of war for every two minutes of peace.

Mr. Safire said that Mr. Barak was calling for a lesser Israel. This is mean-spirited indeed. In recent months, Israelis have begun wandering into the West Bank to buy refrigerators and other goods, to go to jazz clubs and have dinner in Arab restaurants. Many millions of dollars have crossed the borders. Is it so lesser to live with your neighbor in peace? What kind of lesser is this when you have a more secure world in which every mother does not have to anticipate a battlefield death for her son.

This argument about Arab untrustworthiness is a shrewd cover for the underlying right-wing wish to have all the land-to remain as is, to give nothing. This was a Zionist formulation rejected by Ben Gurion a long time ago. It is still with us-issues of safety, while real enough in themselves, also serve to disguise the desire to take all, no matter what.

There are real questions of security and I assume that Mr. Barak's military men are not suckers or dupes. It won't be easy since the terrorism won't stop just because more agreements are made. The fundamentalists in Israel will not give up any part of their particular Zionist vision easily. But stepping forward, trusting, is essential so that this dance, as exhausted as it leaves us, at least continues till a new dawn.

Mr. Safire yipped louder and louder as it became clear that the President would not, bitter lipped, depart from office in a helicopter, as had Mr. Safire's own boss some decades ago. Mr. Safire had been gleeful at the spectacle of egg on the Presidential face and monotonous in his predictable comments, not for the good of the nation, but for the pleasure of revenge, for the satisfaction of avenging his own President, Richard Nixon, or so it seemed to many.

For Mr. Safire, Monicagate was first and foremost a grand epilogue to Watergate. It was a chance to do unto others what had been done unto him. That Nixon was brought down because he was playing dirty politics about matters of communal interest while Mr. Clinton was simply indulging his bad taste in floozies was a distinction that Mr. Safire was unwilling to make. There is text in the Mr. Safire columns to support this point. We read it in the joy of the attack. We saw it in the relentless zeal to bring the President down which went beyond partisan politics into lip-smacking joy.

We knew back then from some of the taped Nixon conversations that Nixon thought Jews were not suitable for his daughter's company. We knew that he thought liberals were too Jewish or Jews were too liberal and there were too many of them in New York.

Now with the newly released transcripts we see again that Nixon was blemished by social anti-Semitism by which we mean the repeating of unpleasant generalizations, stereotyping, a visceral dislike of Jews. Let's not get overexcited. Nowhere does Nixon express genocidal thoughts or antidemocratic wishes, at least not in the tapes released so far. He simply expresses the causal anti-Semitism of country-club types, of the corporate America of its time.

That didn't prevent him from working with Henry Kissinger or Mr. Safire himself. He was perfectly willing to use Jewish brains when it suited him. But in his statement that all communists were Jews except for Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss-and he wasn't so sure about Hiss-we hear his fundamental primitive belief that Jews were suspect. A lot of people in this country believed that, and I have no doubt that many of them still do. An anti-Semitism that doesn't hamper Jewish opportunity in the university or the law firm or the corporation or the medical establishment is run of the mill, rather like cell changes that could become carcinogenic but are not yet. We can live with that: very carefully.

But I am concerned that Mr. Safire remains so loyal to Nixon. Yes, it must have been nice to have been near the center of power. Yes, Nixon might have given Mr. Safire a pat on the back, an entry into the Oval Office, a pass to the best seats in America the powerful, but to be the exception is a pretty wild act, a riding of a bull in a rodeo that can easily land you on your back in the dust, with blood on your shirt.

There have always been court Jews who doctored or toiled in the treasury, who were valued and rewarded even at times when the general laws oppressed or excluded most Jews from the general society. It has not been bad for the Jewish community that a rare few (think Esther and Mordecai) have made their way into the centers of power, working as it were behind enemy lines.

Nevertheless a man who employs the kind of casual anti-Semitic banter we have heard on the newly released Nixon tapes is not a patriotic American. He is not a person we would want to trust the laws of the land with. He is not a generous or kind man. He is afraid of Jews, and a man who is afraid of you is not your friend, not ever. Mr. Safire was duped.

I don't believe these anti-Semitic remarks were made in front of Mr. Safire. That's the sort of remark you make when the servants are back in the pantry, not when they're pouring your coffee. But now that he knows, doesn't he feel a bit queasy? Mr. Clinton may have his sexual hang-ups, but he truly is not a man of little bigotries. His vision of America includes all of us, and no tapes will turn up in the future that belie that. Politics of course is about far more than who likes you and who doesn't, but I am puzzled that Mr. Safire hasn't reconsidered his loyalty to Nixon. It seems likely that it wouldn't have been reciprocated.

I realize that all questions cannot be reduced to the Jewish issue. A sophisticated American Jew like Mr. Safire is not a Jew first and then a Republican or whatever. He is first an American, a writer, a political pundit, etc., and he is entitled to form his own identity in the forge of his private heart just as the rest of us do.

But I am wondering if Mr. Safire remembers that friendship with a man who doesn't like Jews is like swimming with sharks. A shark should be bopped on the nose from time to time. It is not a member of an endangered species.

Social anti-Semitism does not shock us. It does not require a call to arms or even a dozen fund-raising letters from the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Still it wounds, and still it alarms, and still it reminds us to keep our passports up to date and our heads out of the sand.

Moral lapses come in all forms, and in this post-Holocaust world the anti-Semitism of Nixon is far more unattractive than the sexual habits of our current President. No wonder Nixon condoned the plumbers and their bumbling shenanigans. All that anti-Communist huffing and puffing covered his lack of understanding of what makes American democracy worth living and dying for-a vision of a just world in which the self-evident truths we hold are not P.R. for the masses but the very heart of the matter.

Post or the last few editions of the Drudge Report , the results

are in on the DNA testing of the supposed Presidential love child, Danny

Williams. The lurid claim by the boy's mother, a former prostitute and

cocaine addict named Bobbie Ann Williams, that Bill Clinton sired her son

during paid liaisons, was a costly hoax. According to editors of the

Star , the supermarket tabloid that sponsored a laboratory comparison

between Mr. Clinton's DNA and that of his purported offspring,

"it wasn't even close.

This latest exercise in smear journalism, promoted as an adjunct to the

impeachment trial, proved useful in assessing the professionalism and

decency of various media, new and old. It also showed that a baseless

charge can reach an audience of millions, even when major newspapers and

networks restrain themselves.

The "Clinton love child" is a hoary Arkansas legend revived

from time to time by the President's unprincipled enemies. The most

recent version traces back to an on-line Web site maintained by Christopher

Ruddy, a writer employed by right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon

Scaife.

Beginning last November, Mr. Ruddy's Web site featured a "love

child" series, including a credulous interview with the boy's

aunt, and then boasted on Jan. 3 that its coverage had "caught the eye

of Star sleuth Richard Gooding, reviving his interest in the story

and propelling him down to Little Rock."

Although the Star apparently tried to keep its investigation

secret, Matt Drudge heard about the tests and blared his "world

exclusive" over the New Year's weekend. Then Rupert

Murdoch's media conglomerate, sponsor of Mr. Drudge's weekly TV

show, splashed his "scoop" across the front page of the

Post and in the once-august Times of London.

From there the mindless repetition was taken up by Tonight host

Jay Leno, babbling on about "the hooker and the President" during

his monologue every night for a full week. No one expects accuracy or

restraint from a comedian, of course, but let's hope Mr. Leno never

suffers the kind of calumny for which he (along with various lesser

broadcasters on talk radio) was such a gleeful conduit.

In this ugly episode's aftermath, respectable journalists

congratulated themselves for passing up the bait offered by Mr. Drudge (who

assiduously sought the Star 's DNA test, it must be noted, and

dutifully reported the deflating result). In The Washington

Post and on CNN, media pundit Howard Kurtz noted with satisfaction the

decision by his own paper as well as The New York Times and the

networks to ignore the love child without solid proof.

Yet that commendable judgment shouldn't obscure the tabloidish

excesses of some prominent mainstream journalists who deserve the kind of

condemnation always reserved for Mr. Drudge and the Star . An

outstanding example came to light on Jan. 5, when an almost unnoticed

Associated Press item reported that over the objections of independent

counsel Kenneth Starr, Judge Norma Holloway Johnson had unsealed certain

documents showing that White House aides Bruce Lindsey and Sidney

Blumenthal "were fact witnesses and not targets for

prosecution."

In a phrase, the A.P. debunked copious speculation by various news

outlets that Mr. Lindsey and Mr. Blumenthal would sooner or later be indicted by the independent

counsel for obstruction of justice and other possible offenses.

Among the many egregious examples that could be cited, a series of

columns by The Times ' William Safire stands out. The

Pulitzer-certified Op-Ed columnist might be deemed the Drudge of the

Beltway establishment–but that would be unfair to Mr. Drudge, who has

a better record of correcting himself.

Last year, Mr. Safire repeatedly suggested that Mr. Lindsey was the real

author of the "talking points," the famed "smoking gun"

of Lewinsky scandal obstruction that turned out to be much smoke and no

gun. As early as March 9, 1998, he implicated Mr. Lindsey as the

"talking-pointer." Having described Mr. Lindsey as

"notorious" and "conspiratorial," he returned to the

subject on June 15, citing the "brilliant exegesis" of the

talking points in The Observer by Philip Weiss to support

conjecture that Mr. Lindsey was the talking points' "suborn-again

author." (Seven months later, my esteemed Observer colleague

also hasn't found time or space to acknowledge that his accusatory

analysis was flat wrong.)

Around the same time last June, Mr. Safire remarked without citing any

evidence that Mr. Blumenthal "may be Colson Revisited," a

reference to Watergate felon Charles Colson, who "pled guilty to

disseminating derogatory information from Daniel Ellsberg's F.B.I.

file." Such defamation, the old Nixonite noted, "was obstruction

of justice … I suspect Starr will charge that a defamation conspiracy

is obstruction whether aimed at defense or prosecution." Now we know

that there will be no obstruction indictment of either Clinton aide, and

that none was ever considered.

Fortunately for Mr. Safire, defamation in a newspaper column is not a

crime, and often is not even actionable if couched in clever phrasing. It

is merely a public disgrace, to him and to the editors who give him

license.

I am of half a mind to give them Mr. Clinton. Let him resign with a confused boyish look on his face. Let him tell us that our democracy is strong and will provide a bridge into the next century, yakety-yak. Let Al Gore get going. Let Paul Newman or Robert Redford run for President. Monica Lewinsky has been fun, but the joke has been deflated and not even Viagra will bring it back to life. Let the Republicans be tarred with the foolishness of unseating a President by tugging at his pants zipper. Let the prosecutor who was never unbiased, tainted by his conversation with Paula Jones and by his financial backers, live with what he's done. Let him crow at all the Republican $1,000-a-plate dinners. His day will come, and in this world, too. If he brings down the elected President because he has forced him to lie over such a personal and silly matter and then caught him in a cover-up, the public will not love him dearly for his prurient persistence. The party and the ideas he represents will not be more valued because of this nasty victory, which I suspect or hope will turn Pyrrhic within a very short time. Unlike Nixon, Mr. Clinton did not sneer at Americans, he did not abuse his political power. The shadows on his face disappear before the TV cameras, revealing a fellow a little too glad with the hand and more glib than genius.

Mr. Clinton, like the rest of our culture today, is as shallow as a glass of water, talks too much, way too much, wheels and deals too much, is the product of that long encounter group we call the 60's, too much EST and too little backbone, too much primal scream and too little calculus. All that embarrassing touchy-feely stuff makes him a likable if not highly respected President. If on his last day in office he looks sad but brave on camera, with Hillary and Chelsea holding his hands tightly in theirs, the American public may not feel warmly about his attackers. They may take out their anger at the polls. So it is possible that Kenneth Starr will in the end undermine his mean-spirited, puritan religious-right supporters and give an (albeit unwilling) hand to the a-little-bit-of-government-is-good-for-you folks like me.

We all know that sex can seem like love and love is what we all need, and America will forgive Mr. Clinton for wearing his hungry heart on his sleeve and confusing his arm with his procreative organ. But I doubt America will forgive Kenneth Starr for having a prune pit for a coronary vessel.

The pompous types who are carrying on now about subverting justice and suborning perjury just won't ever understand why the shock value of a broken rule doesn't carry much weight anymore. But we know that everyone hires image makers, and while we appreciate a polished performance like the kind Santa Claus and the Easter bunny put in each year, we retain our private doubts about their reality. Those goody-two-shoes on the right who moan about family values have no purchase on morality. Newt divorces his cancer-fighting wife while she is in the hospital. Susan Smith's religious stepfather is in bed with her. The National Rifle Association, supported by the Republicans in Congress, wants you to believe that a teenager with an assault rifle is an all-American boy just whistling Dixie for freedom's sake.

So if Ken Starr and Bob Grant and the Aryan Nation folk who put signs everywhere asking for Mr. Clinton's impeachment win, I would bet that the inevitable ache in my head will only be temporary. In the long run, this dreary sexualization of politics is going to run out of steam.

Yes, the feminist movement was complicit in this twist of history by allowing sexual harassment to trump all other issues on the public agenda. Getting Senator Bob Packwood for kissing in the halls may not have been such a good idea. Holding Anita Hill up for sainthood may also have been a mistake. Screaming and yelling about private behavior by public officials has become a petard by which we ourselves have now been hoisted. What's sauce for the gander has become sauce for the goose, and we have been well basted. Sexual naughtiness is not the moral equivalent of being on the wrong side of issues such as civil rights, decent salaries for working people, adequate universal health care, improvement of all schools, creating a fair society open to all races and creeds, preserving the separation of church and state so that America does not end up like the Balkans or Rwanda, with all our limbs left in the nearest McDonald's parking lot or strewn along the repaired-by-boondoggle highways.

The Jerry Springer -esque show that our executive and Congressional branches of government have become will eventually wear out its ratings. The cultural change that gave us patter, soft-shoe, performer, image–rather than real politics with content, with words that say what they mean, like it or not, words that aren't codes for other words that are themselves codes–will give way to whatever is coming next. I wouldn't want to be those flag-waving, soap-in-your-mouth Republicans when the tide turns. They are going to be swept out to sea.

Well, maybe, maybe not.

No denying it–the radical right and their minions will cheer as we hit the din. It wasn't a conspiracy exactly. It was just politics as usual, in which the nasties rolled us for everything we had. So if Mr. Clinton goes, if Susan McDougal rots in jail and Monica gets a job at the Heritage Foundation and Pat Robertson is our next Secretary of State, we will bide our time. The old scores will be settled. I understand William Safire, revenge may be sweeter than success.