Word: absurd
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Similar critiques can be made of post-debate commentary, and of the absurd practice of deciding who "won." Both practices tend to obscure what actually happened, and to leave a different image in the mind of each viewer. Why couldn't the League president have been the moderator? Why couldn't distinguished former elected officials, from all points of the political spectrum, have constituted the panel? At least then a tendency to digress from the true subject of the evening would have been understandable, even expected, and could have been expressly forbidden beforehand...
...Grenada invasion for 90 minutes as his sole foreign policy success. He could do little to defend his economic program-considered his strongest point. He will look even older and frailer when he has to answere for the first time in public, for three Lebanon bombings, his absurd nuclear posture toward the Soviet Union, his inability to assert American influence over anything larger than a golf course, and what amounts to terrorist activity in Nicaragua...
...case, notes Benjamin Kaplan, a retired Massachusetts judge and a professor of Law emeritus, "Any notion that a Law Review article could over-whehn a judge is absurd...
...collective school prayer (all "inherently public in nature") and not on help for the poor, racial discrimination or even murder (where "the church can persuade the individual"). To argue that the more collective the issue is, the more right the church has to try to influence public policy, is absurd. If anything, the reverse is true. Such attempts to justify a double standard give sophistry a bad name. Why not admit the obvious? That different churches with different conceptions of morality and different social priorities will try to shape the larger society in different ways, and that one should...
...Archbishop go loo far? It is, of course, absurd to tell the church to stay out of politics, if politics is defined as that universe of activity in which people collectively decide what the public good is and how to pursue it. The church teaches moral principles and values, and these inevitably spill over into public affairs, sometimes into actual policy, like civil rights and nuclear arms. But political partisanship-choosing sides in elections, endorsing or vetoing candidates-is another matter altogether...