Safire to resign in disgrace because of neverending stream of bad reporting

[a_unique_person]

Not.



# "If by the first week in October Attorney General Janet Reno does not seek appointment of Independent Counsel, she may well be the first Cabinet member since William Belknap in 1876 to be impeached."
# "What did Vince or Web or Bill or I bill Whitewater or McDougal? Were those records shredded? God, I hope so." (Safire, writing the column in the voice of Hillary Clinton.)
# "During President Clinton's watch, America's most vital nuclear secrets -- guarded intensely for five decades -- have been allowed to spill out all over the world."



http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/11/22/safire/index3.html

Rather resigns because he puts out a dud story, Michael Moore has a whole army pursuing him. But what do the conservative hacks get? Pulitzer Prizes for inventing sheer fantasy.

[Ed]

Originally posted by a_unique_person
Not.



http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/11/22/safire/index3.html

Rather resigns because he puts out a dud story, Michael Moore has a whole army pursuing him. But what do the conservative hacks get? Pulitzer Prizes for inventing sheer fantasy.

Rather was in charge of CBS News(sic) Safire write an op-ed piece.

[Mycroft]

William Safire's "On Language" was one of the first columns I started reading on a regular basis as a child. From there I started reading his political columns, and I credit him for helping to lay the foundations of my thinking today.

He's a great writer, even if you disagree with his politics. This sort of thing is just sour grapes.

[BPSCG]

Originally posted by Mycroft
William Safire's "On Language" was one of the first columns I started reading on a regular basis as a child. From there I started reading his political columns, and I credit him for helping to lay the foundations of my thinking today.

He's a great writer, even if you disagree with his politics. This sort of thing is just sour grapes. I read his book "On Language", a collection of his columns, many years ago.

One item I'm reminded of almost daily is his observation that the word "successfully" is almost always redundant. "Police successfully foiled a holdup today..." Safire asked, "How do you unsuccessfully foil a holdup?"

[hgc]

Safire is a terrific writer, but his integrity took a serious hit over the last couple of years due to his fealty to the stench of W. I think he was overcompensating for his regret for supporting Clinton in 96.

Btw, his columns in support of the freedom to burn the flag is some of the best conservative political writing.

[BPSCG]

Originally posted by hgc
Safire is a terrific writer, but his integrity took a serious hit over the last couple of years due to his fealty to the stench of W. "Took a serious hit" from whom? What you call "stench," 60,000,000 others called "reasons to re-elect."

[Kodiak]

a_u_p:

I'll bet you'll not start a thread calling of the resignations of the heads of nearly every environmental group in existence for incorrectly predicting the distruction of the planet since the late 1960's... :D :D


Troll... :nope:

[Frank Newgent]

Originally posted by BPSCG

I read his book "On Language", a collection of his columns, many years ago.

One item I'm reminded of almost daily is his observation that the word "successfully" is almost always redundant. "Police successfully foiled a holdup today..." Safire asked, "How do you unsuccessfully foil a holdup?"
Safire fails (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6430019/) at cogent political observation.

You know, I think the social, political event of the past year was Janet Jackson's exposure of her right breast on television during the Super Bowl.
Maureen Dowd is going to have to buy her own can of hair spray.

[hgc]

Originally posted by BPSCG
"Took a serious hit" from whom?From me. My estimation of him went down. What you call "stench," 60,000,000 others called "reasons to re-elect." Bully for them. I should shut up now and not criticize the president? Get bent.

[BPSCG]

Originally posted by hgc
From me. My estimation of him went down. Bully for them. I should shut up now and not criticize the president? Get bent. Not at all. Express your opinion all you like. Express it until you're blue in the face.

But your use of the passive voice tipped me off that you were trying to pull a rhetorical fast one.

"Safire is a terrific writer, but his integrity took a serious hit over the last couple of years due to his fealty to the stench of W."

The phrase "...his integrity took a serious hit..." has an object (his integrity - the noun that receives the action of the verb), a verb (took), but no subject (the noun that is doing the action). When you put the subject after the verb ("The cat was hit by a steamroller"), you're using passive voice. Using passive voice lets you state action without stating what is doing the action, by leaving out the subject. Most famous example: "Mistakes were made."

"By whom, Mr. President?" should have been the very next question.

Anyway, your sentence doesn't say who hit Safire's integrity. The uninformed reader could be forgiven for concluding that the great masses of Safire's readers hit his integrity, when in fact, you were just talking about yourself.

I've been on a crusade against the passive voice since my senior year in college when a history prof returned a term paper to me that was a mass of red ink; he'd underlined my every use of passive voice for the first three or four pages.

Passive voice is a great tool for when you want to duck responsibility for your words, or shift your ideas to someone else. Politicians are masters.

[hgc]

Originally posted by BPSCG
Not at all. Express your opinion all you like. Express it until you're blue in the face.

But your use of the passive voice tipped me off that you were trying to pull a rhetorical fast one.

"Safire is a terrific writer, but his integrity took a serious hit over the last couple of years due to his fealty to the stench of W."

The phrase "...his integrity took a serious hit..." has an object (his integrity - the noun that receives the action of the verb), a verb (took), but no subject (the noun that is doing the action). When you put the subject after the verb ("The cat was hit by a steamroller"), you're using passive voice. Using passive voice lets you state action without stating what is doing the action, by leaving out the subject. Most famous example: "Mistakes were made."

"By whom, Mr. President?" should have been the very next question.

Anyway, your sentence doesn't say who hit Safire's integrity. The uninformed reader could be forgiven for concluding that the great masses of Safire's readers hit his integrity, when in fact, you were just talking about yourself.

I've been on a crusade against the passive voice since my senior year in college when a history prof returned a term paper to me that was a mass of red ink; he'd underlined my every use of passive voice for the first three or four pages.

Passive voice is a great tool for when you want to duck responsibility for your words, or shift your ideas to someone else. Politicians are masters. Your point is agreed to. :D

[BPSCG]

Originally posted by hgc
Your point is agreed to. :D Your reasonableness is admired. :D

[Ed]

Originally posted by BPSCG
Not at all. Express your opinion all you like. Express it until you're blue in the face.

But your use of the passive voice tipped me off that you were trying to pull a rhetorical fast one.

"Safire is a terrific writer, but his integrity took a serious hit over the last couple of years due to his fealty to the stench of W."

The phrase "...his integrity took a serious hit..." has an object (his integrity - the noun that receives the action of the verb), a verb (took), but no subject (the noun that is doing the action). When you put the subject after the verb ("The cat was hit by a steamroller"), you're using passive voice. Using passive voice lets you state action without stating what is doing the action, by leaving out the subject. Most famous example: "Mistakes were made."

"By whom, Mr. President?" should have been the very next question.

Anyway, your sentence doesn't say who hit Safire's integrity. The uninformed reader could be forgiven for concluding that the great masses of Safire's readers hit his integrity, when in fact, you were just talking about yourself.

I've been on a crusade against the passive voice since my senior year in college when a history prof returned a term paper to me that was a mass of red ink; he'd underlined my every use of passive voice for the first three or four pages.

Passive voice is a great tool for when you want to duck responsibility for your words, or shift your ideas to someone else. Politicians are masters.


[polite applause]

[/polite applause]

[a_unique_person]

Originally posted by Kodiak
a_u_p:

I'll bet you'll not start a thread calling of the resignations of the heads of nearly every environmental group in existence for incorrectly predicting the distruction of the planet since the late 1960's... :D :D


Troll... :nope:

I haven't done that, though, have I.

[Dorian Gray]

"By whom, Mr. President?" should have been the very next question. You're right. It should have. FROM SAFIRE. But Safire thinks Bush made no mistakes. Or that Bush did, but (insert qualifying comparison or phrase).

I notice that you have never chided Bush or any Redman for doing this passive voice thingy you disserted on. Trolling will have been done.

[a_unique_person]

William Safires rules for writing (http://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/protein/pert/safire.rules.html)

Except that they weren't just opinions, he was making predictions and observations supposely from good sources.

Eg, the Hillary Clinton "quote". That is about as low as you can go. A common tactic here, but I would have thought a journalist, even in an 'opionion piece', still had to have some standards.

If you read the article, he also campaigned against and brought down someone from Carters administration, once again, on no factual basis whatsoever.

Rather at least had some basis for putting out the story he did, even if it was wrong, and he even resigned over it.



Yet for all of his talents, over the years Safire has clearly abused the column -- by presenting highly questionable propositions as if they were accepted facts, making baseless accusations against public figures (often with the insinuation of criminality), and wielding the column with alarming transparency as a blunt instrument to settle personal scores and prop up his allies, both here and abroad.

.....

"So I think at that point something happened in my development as a writer," Safire told a radio interviewer in 1977, the transcripts of which were dug up last year by Washingtonian magazine. "I stopped sucking my thumb and staring at the wall and started getting on the phone and getting out and talking to people and trying to find out why this was going on."

"Lance," wrote the Washingtonian, "was the new Safire's first victim."

In 1978 Safire won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of columns attacking President Jimmy Carter's White House budget director, Bert Lance, for allegedly commingling his own bank dealings with his work for the government. Safire's high-profile broadsides in the Times -- "Broken Lance," "Lance Cover-Up," "Lancegate" (Safire writes his own column headlines) -- were instrumental in forcing Lance's resignation. Lance's scalp signaled Safire's transformation from a Nixon hack into a big-league pundit, a player. But the Lance scandal itself, like so many of Safire's crusades over the years, was mostly smoke and mirrors.

"The fact is a lot of what he was saying turned out to be crap," recalls Hodding Carter, who served as State Department spokesman during the Carter administration. Even the ultraconservative American Spectator exonerated Lance, noting, "Eight federal agencies -- the FBI, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the SEC, the Federal Election Commission, the IRS, the FDIC, the Federal Reserve, and the U.S. Senate -- conducted investigations of Lance and found nothing."

[Beerina]

Originally posted by BPSCG
Not at all. Express your opinion all you like. Express it until you're blue in the face.

But your use of the passive voice tipped me off that you were trying to pull a rhetorical fast one.

"Safire is a terrific writer, but his integrity took a serious hit over the last couple of years due to his fealty to the stench of W."

The phrase "...his integrity took a serious hit..." has an object (his integrity - the noun that receives the action of the verb), a verb (took), but no subject (the noun that is doing the action). When you put the subject after the verb ("The cat was hit by a steamroller"), you're using passive voice. Using passive voice lets you state action without stating what is doing the action, by leaving out the subject. Most famous example: "Mistakes were made."


"Integrity" is the core noun. What did his integrity do? It took something. What did it take? A hit. "Integrity" is not the object of the sentence, and this is not a passive sentence; it is an active one.

I assume you're in jest, though.


I've been on a crusade against the passive voice since my senior year in college when a history prof returned a term paper to me that was a mass of red ink; he'd underlined my every use of passive voice for the first three or four pages.

Passive voice is a great tool for when you want to duck responsibility for your words, or shift your ideas to someone else. Politicians are masters.

Politicians master the passive voice. Of course, one would use artistic license to state "politicians have mastered the passive voice." Your rigid lack of such license indicates...you finish the sentence.

[BPSCG]

Originally posted by Dorian Gray
You're right. It should have. FROM SAFIRE. But Safire thinks Bush made no mistakes. Or that Bush did, but (insert qualifying comparison or phrase).Umm, the famous (to some of us, anyway) "Mistakes were made" came from Ronald Reagan.

So it probably would have been inappropriate for Safire to chide Bush about it.
I notice that you have never chided Bush or any Redman for doing this passive voice thingy you disserted on. Trolling will have been done. Well, unless I'm very much mistaken - and I bet I'm not - I believe I did just that with Reagan.