Well, for the record, if Wikipedia’s quotes are accurate, Spoke had it right: Van Zant said “Neil was shooting all the ducks in order to kill one or two”.
And “Wallace and I have very little in common,” Van Zant himself said, “I don’t like what he says about colored people.”
And I always agreed with the description in Wiki of the Watergate lines: that Van Zandt was saying "Hey, you can’t blame me for the racist ahole in the Governor’s office, unless you take blame for the corrupt ahole in the President’s office. "