William Safire, The Man Who Inspired Me To Blog, Dead At 79

Proof • September 28, 2009

I wasn’t all that familiar with Safire as a commentator on political issues given that most of his career happened before I was born and during my childhood. If I ever read any of his columns I don’t remember them. My lone memorable experience with something Safire wrote was reading his novel, Scandalmonger: A Novel, a fictionalized (though plausible) historical story about the interactions of some of our founding fathers with pamphleteers.
People who I consider to be the ancestors of bloggers.
I read this book in early 2003, not long before I started blogging, and it was instrumental in leading me to take up this medium for political commentary. I was aware of blogging at the time, and was reading some of the scant few political blogs in existence in that stone age of online political commentary, and saw a lot of parallels between the self-publishing pamphleteers of Safire’s novel and the self-publishers of the internet. I saw how the pamphleteers made a difference in informing and shaping public opinion in their day and it made me want to do the same thing in my day.
So I started my own blog and six years later I’m still hard at it.
There’s not much I can say to eulogize William Safire. My knowledge of his career and works is so narrow that I wouldn’t even be writing this if I hadn’t, by chance, picked up one of his novels one day and found in it some inspiration.
Without really knowing anything else about him, I am thankful to Safire for that.

Tags: Politics, Site Announcements

http://Array Neiman

You probably liked him because like you, Safire described himself as a libertarian conservative. He was thoughtful, civil and had a great intellect. Sorry to say he worked for the NYT and served on the Pulitzer Board, both thoroughly disreputable organizations in my opinion.

I often disagreed with him, his worse mistake was in voting for Bill Clinton; but I have nothing bad to say about him at all and he deserves our respect for making a difference in the world in which he lived, which so few of us do.
Carter

For many years, he was the only reason to read the NYT’s editorial page. His columns and books on the English language, its quirks, uses and misuses, were also entertaining and educational. (He’s the guy who gave us “nattering nabobs of negativism.”) And he always seemed like a matter of fact fellow on TV. Just an all around good contributors to the public sphere.
FlyOnTheWall

I disagreed with him on a number of occasions but his positions was always well thought out and stated. I probably remember the disagreements more because he made me work so hard to support my position to myself.

One of the few really good political writers. I was clueless about his fiction, thanks for letting me know.
http://sayanythingblog.com/readers/author/realitybasedbob/ realitybasedbob

Billy Safire on Raygun:

“…President Reagan, the former hard-liner, having turned his State Department over to a crew of waffling accommodationists, probably feels he occupies the middle ground in foreign affairs – and that his old supporters have ”nowhere else to go.” He is profoundly mistaken. The revolt of the hawks is under way, the ranks are swelling with the most surprising volunteers, the search for new leadership has begun, and if Ronald Reagan fails to awake to the hard-liners’ anger at his betrayal, he will discover that he has lost this bedrock constituency….

Billy also uses the descriptive “Neo-conservative” and he thinks it’s a good thing.
sayanything-6955

RIP William.

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William Safire, The Man Who Inspired Me To Blog, Dead At 79

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