Monday, April 3, 1972
Spiro Lashes Out At Critics Of Nixon
AGUSTA, Maine (UPI) --Vice President Spiro T. Agnew Friday labeled Democratic senators who have criticized President Nixon as "defamers of America."In a speech prepared for the Maine Republican convention, the vice president declared: "Vicious attacks on America have become standard items in the campaign kits of men who aspire -or have aspired -to our nation"s highest office."Among those Agnew placed in this category were Sens. George S. McGovern, Edmund S. Muskie, Edward M. Kennedy and J. William Fulbright.Of the President's Senate critics, he commented: "They vilify and harass the leaders of the United States, but they can find nothing wrong with the leadership of this country's enemies."They have taken the old Stephen Decatur line and twisted it into a grotesque parody of itself. No longer is it "Our county, right or wrong.""Agnew again took issue with Democrats who have assailed Nixon's bombing response to the North Vietnamese invasion."To the Democrats," he said, "this was a serious escalation of the war and in their Alice in Wonderland world, it was not the attackers who escalated the war but the defenders. It was not the invaders, but those who tired to stop the invasion. It was not the armored columns from North Vietnam rolling into South Vietnam, but the American airplanes sent out to halt those columns."Agnew told his audience "We now live in a curious era when the national spotlight is forever focused on the paranoid and the masochist and the smear-America cheap shot artist. We live in an ear that panders to those darlings of the left who delight in denouncing this country..."He described the latter as "cicerones of self-hate" and added: "It isn't just the hard-core left that shrills the refrain. You find condemnations of America on the editorial pages of some of our most influential newspapers and magazines.""Spiro Lashes Out At Critics of Nixon", by (UPI) published in the Pacific Stars and Stripes on Sunday, April 30, 1972 and reprinted from European and Pacific Stars and Stripes, a Department of Defense publication copyright, 2002 European and Pacific Stars and Stripes.