Word: agnew
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Quayle in part plays the Spiro Agnew role to Bush's Richard Nixon. But when Agnew went after the "nattering nabobs" and student protesters, he did so with a thuggish menace that Quayle lacks. Quayle smacks more of Midwestern Americana, of The Music Man's Professor Harold Hill, and Quayle's lines about unmarried mothers sounded like an echo: "We got trouble, right here in River City!" -- brazen hussies strutting around town in a family way: Make your blood boil? Well, I should...
...Administration turned loose Vice President Spiro Agnew to lead the charge of Middle Americans, the Silent Majority, and speak against the war protesters. The truculent young speechwriter putting the words in Agnew's mouth was Pat Buchanan. He had Agnew delivering a sort of W.C. Fields line about "an effete corps of impudent snobs." Now candidate Buchanan prepares the rhetoric for himself...
...political gambit, the method is tried and true. If you are an unpopular Vice President, refurbish your image by deriding an occupational group with an even lower approval rating than your own. Spiro Agnew popularized the ploy back in 1969 with his bitter denunciations of the news media. Following the same playbook, Vice President Dan Quayle -- a lawyer -- wangled an invitation to the American Bar Association convention in Atlanta and last week used the forum to mount a blistering attack on the legal profession...
...adorned the New York Times op-ed page since 1973 and appears in more than 300 other papers. For cognoscenti, there were three surefire Safirific clues embedded in the quotation: 1) this former Richard Nixon speechwriter remains a nattering nabob of negativism (he also crafted lines for Spiro Agnew) about Mikhail Gorbachev's intentions; 2) Safire's forcefulness of expression and clarity of opinion, for he is not a columnist who seeks safety in mainstream musings; and 3) the wordplay that is Safire's trademark -- in this case, revamping Winston Churchill's pledge not to dismember the British empire...
...longer at home are their two children: Mark, 25, a computer-software specialist, and Annabel, 24, a painter. Gracious hosts, the Safires are known for their break-the-fast party after Yom Kippur. Amid the memorabilia that fill the house, there is one bit of revisionism: Agnew's autograph is no longer on the photograph of Helene's 1969 citizenship ceremony. But the artifact that best symbolizes the weight of Safire's words is a framed clipping of a 1988 column heavily annotated with the commentary of George Bush...