Word: libertarian
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William Safire, who died on Sept. 27 of pancreatic cancer at age 79, was for 32 years a standard bearer of what he called "libertarian conservatism" in the otherwise mainly predictably liberal Op-Ed pages of the New York Times. A former public-relations executive who claimed to have staged the famous 1959 "kitchen debate" in Moscow between then Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev on the merits of capitalism and communism, Safire went on to work in the White House as a speechwriter, before starting a career as a wordsmith at the Times. And a wordsmith...
Safire was always keen to stress the libertarian part of his political belief, which led him into interesting waters. He was a longtime adversary of Lee Kuan Yew, the leader of Singapore and a man much admired by un-adjectivally qualified conservatives, for what he saw as Lee's illiberal tendencies toward the press and opponents. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 1999, Safire had a long interview with Lee, which was posted online. It's still worth reading as an example of two first-class minds going at it hammer and tongs. He was critical...
...that libertarian thing was, when all is said and done, just an adjective; Safire was a true conservative, and a partisan one too, biffing in print, and not always fairly, political opponents from Bert Lance to Hillary Clinton. He was a cheerleader for some of the more outlandish justifications for the Iraq war, like the supposed link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, though commentators like David Corn - a former Washington editor of the Nation - delighted in pointing out that the Times' reporting in its news pages had the habit of undercutting the claims that Safire was advancing as fact...
Glasheen, a self-described Republican from the "libertarian wing of the party," hopes new DNA testing on old evidence will free more prisoners. However, that hope is limited: Dallas County kept evidence on file, hence the large number of exonerated prisoners from that area, but evidence in Houston was lost in a flood, and smaller counties across Texas did not keep evidence once the appeals process ran out. "There's a whole bunch of guys down there who were convicted on just eyewitness identification," Glasheen says, as Cole was. There is now a national campaign to press a best-practices...
...Fears of a Clown Beck is 45, tireless, funny, self-deprecating, a recovering alcoholic, a convert to Mormonism, a libertarian and living with ADHD. He is a gifted storyteller with a knack for stitching seemingly unrelated data points into possible conspiracies - if he believed in conspiracies, which he doesn't, necessarily; he's just asking questions. He's just sayin'. In cheerful days of yore, he was a terrific host of a morning-zoo show on an FM Top 40 station. But these aren't cheerful times. For conservatives, these are times of economic uncertainty and political weakness, and Beck...