This whole piece is ugly, sad and really speaks ill of Slate. Bob Novak dies, and Slate runs a hatchet job on him within days. Now Safire gets the same treatment.

But more than being of questionable timing and motive, the critique is stupefyingly petty. So a columnist goes back and forth between reporting factual information and giving his opinion of it. Silly me -- I thought that was the whole point of an opinion column. I guess the seamless blending of fact and opinion is supposed to be the sole province of the Times' newsroom. The whole "keeper" issue is even sillier. We're supposed to think Safire is somehow mendacious because of a disagreement over the extent of a journalistic term of art?

This may be the worst thing I've ever read on Slate.

Hey, Jack waited for the body to cool. That's as much as Safire deserved.

You weep for the sacred memory of Bob Novak?

Get ready; Podhoretz is next.

And how is that different from Conservative posts here and elswhere about Ted Kennedy?

novak and safire deserved it. they were both mean spirited vicious men.

They were indeed.

And lionizing them just excuses the harm they did in support of amoral presidents.

iwasme:

novak and safire deserved it. they were both mean spirited vicious men.

A proposition for which Shafer's little diatribe provides absolutely no support. But then, you don't really need support for that proposition -- the fact that they were conservative is all you need, right? Nothing like reducing policy disagreements to a moralistic judgment on a person's character.

i don't need support to know that safire backed two mean spirited vicious politicans nixon and agnew its on both their records and published.