Dylan Hales

September 28, 2009

Lew Rockwell’s brief blog posting on the death of William Safire provides some food for thought:

Bill Safire, the neocon warmonger and welfare-statist who wrote propaganda speeches for Dick Nixon, has died at 79. He was an erudite guy and the NY Times?s first ?op-ed? columnist, op-ed meaning ?pretending to disasgree with the regime.? But I will always remember his telling me, over the phone in 1981, how much he disliked Ron Paul?s libertarian ideas, especially his opposition to foreign aid and US interventionism in the Middle East.I had made the mistake of including him on a congressional press list that outraged him.

Safire was the godfather of the phony libertarians. An establishmentarian to his core, he was the favorite “conservative” of nearly every bleeding heart liberal I’ve ever met. Of course their were two reasons for their fondness. The first was that Safire wrote for the unimpeachable New York Times. The second was that Safire was a fierce defender of “civil liberties.” 

While there were occasions when Safire took a bold position in defense of individual rights and against the state, he was hardly consistent on such matters. More to the point however is the undeniable fact that Safire was a committed warfare statist and a lifelong defender of the globalist creed. There is nothing “civil” about men of that ilk and even less that is “libertarian” no matter how bastardized the term has become.