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∙ I SEE . . . : A rosy-visioned device most recently revived by Richard Nixon at Miami Beach. An early halcyon-evoker was Robert G. Ingersoll, who orated in 1876 on behalf of James G. Blaine: "I see our country filled with happy homes . . . I see a world without a slave." F.D.R., in 1940: "I see an America where factory workers are not discarded after they reach their prime . . . I see an America of great cultural and educational opportunity for all its people." Adlai Stevenson, in 1952: "I see an America where no man fears to think as he pleases, or say what he thinks . . . I see an America as the horizon of human hopes."
∙ KISS OF DEATH: Erroneously accepted as having originated with the Mafia custom in Sicily. It is Biblical, deriving from the kiss of Judas and his betrayal of Christ.
∙ STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: Coined in its present context by Connecticut Newspaper Editor Charles Dudley Warner in 1850, when he wrote: "True it is that politics makes strange bedfellows." He stole it from Shakespeare's The Tempest (Act II, Scene 2), in which Trinculo, forced by a storm to seek refuge under a sheet with the abhorrent Caliban, says: "There is no other shelter hereabout: misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows."
If anything, these samples prove that today's politicians are much too polite, not to say unimaginative, in their terminology. Satire's best entry is, alas, hardly ever heard these days. It is snollygoster, a word that Harry Truman revived briefly in 1952. According to Truman, a snollygoster was a son of a bitch — in other words, a politician. It is probably related to snallygaster, which is derived from the German schnelle Geister, or "quick spirits." In Maryland, the snallygaster is a mythical bird of prey that feeds on unwary poultry and children. In 1895, a Georgia editor described a snollygoster as "a fellow who wants office regardless of party, platform or principles, and who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnancy." The word may be obsolete, but not the breed.