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I remembered how Safire had speculated, during the tumultuous week after the Starr Report was issued in September 1998, that "indictments or criminal information" concerning the FBI files, the Travel Office and Whitewater would soon emanate from the Office of Independent Counsel. I pulled out an old clip from a few days later, when he had reiterated his demand for action: "We must have more from the Independent Counsel about other crimes: Whitewater, Travelgate and Filegate abuses of power."

As early as January 1997 he had assured his readers that "[s]oon the independent counsel will present evidence of wrongdoing on Whitewater, Travelgate and the rape of privacy in the FBI's files," and that "stunning indictments" would imminently ensue. (That was just before Kenneth Starr tried to quit his job and flee to Pepperdine University.)

Joe Conason Joe Conason's column appears in Salon News every other Tuesday. + Biography + Archives

Then in July 1998, the columnist had confidently predicted once more that a comprehensive report on all of Starr's investigations would be forthcoming "sooner rather than later" and would be "more far-reaching that most imagine."

In one of his September 1998 essays, Safire conceded the distant possibility that the independent counsel might be obliged to "exonerate Hillary, [presidential aide] Bruce Lindsey, [former White House personnel security chief] Craig Livingstone, et. al," -- the first few names on a long list of Clinton friends, associates and employees Safire has accused of assorted crimes. Such an unlikely outcome, he blustered, "would force calumniators like me to eat crow." (As the Times word maven undoubtedly knows, a calumniator is someone who utters calumnies, meaning false and malicious statements.)

Actually, the truth about those unfinished investigations lingering in the files of the independent counsel's office emerged only weeks after the publication of Safire's crow-eating pledge. In November 1998, when Starr testified before the House Judiciary Committee, he conceded that his prosecutors had found no "substantial and credible" evidence of criminality with regard to the three incessantly hyped "scandals."

Fifteen months have passed since that reluctant Starr admission, and Safire hasn't even picked up his fork yet. In fact, by the time of Starr's House testimony, some of the columnist's accusations of criminality against his administration antagonists were more than five years old. Evidently he prefers his crow quite cold.

But as of March 2000, the Times sage still has no space for apologies, and no appetite for a big bite of black feathers. Instead, he took only the briefest notice of his own newspaper's story about the Filegate exoneration on March 13 -- and then rushed onward to predict that three more forthcoming reports from the counsel's office will "detail tawdry corner-cutting and egregious evasiveness, but not prosecutable crime."

Rather portentously, he warns readers once more that "Hillary Clinton, I presume, will face far greater problems with Travelgate than with Filegate," while her husband just might be indicted someday next January for lying about Monica Lewinsky. Given his record, Safire is probably wrong about all that, too. But while we're on the topic of "corner-cutting" and "evasiveness," isn't it long past time that Safire answered publicly for his own journalistic misconduct?

The making of bonehead forecasts is normal practice for pundits of all persuasions, so much so that nobody thinks to hold them accountable. It is a different matter altogether, however, when a columnist on the most influential opinion page in the country repeatedly predicts that people he doesn't like will be indicted and convicted of serious crimes, thereby essentially convicting them in print.

Again and again over the past several years, Safire has charged the Clintons and their associates with such offenses as fraud, conspiracy, perjury, witness tampering and obstruction of justice. Using the jargon of Watergate to emphasize their culpability, he has written about the so-called Clinton scandals as if even the most minimal professional scruples and cautions did not apply to him -- let alone the standards of fairness that are held sacred at the newspaper of record and in all reputable news organizations.

Next page | Time to 'fess up, sir