Word: absurdly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...State George Shultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger persuaded Reagan to hold a meeting to discuss the NSC's proposal to sell arms directly to Iran. Six months earlier, when Weinberger received a CIA report favoring weapons deals with the Iranian army, he penciled in THIS IS ABSURD. Shultz also objected to arms sales but believed that the U.S. should consider pursuing a dialogue with Iran...
...Secretary of Defense learned of the Iran initiative in June 1985, when the NSC suggested that "allies and friends" could supply arms to the Tehran regime. He opposed the idea, calling it "absurd." But when President Reagan authorized arms sales to Iran in January 1986, Weinberger instructed the Army to cooperate by making available the weapons requested by the CIA. First, however, he insisted on access to all intelligence relating to the operation. Weinberger continued to complain privately about the initiative, but -- unlike Secretary of State George Shultz -- never made his objections public. Like most other members of Reagan...
...gung-ho activism. Finding some legal justification for them was another of those details that the President left to aides. The other tendency was to delegate disproportionate authority to subordinates who took a can-do approach, and then to let them operate with little supervision. In retrospect it seems absurd that so ostensibly minor a functionary as North would have been entrusted with such delicate matters as negotiating freedom for American hostages held in Lebanon and organizing a secret network to supply the contras. And not only seems -- it was absurd, and it got Reagan right into a dangerous mess...
That a half-century of American literary studies could be recalled for a defective platitude is a contingency that would appeal to Playwright Eugene Ionesco. A major contributor to the theater of the absurd (he prefers the term "theater of derision"), Ionesco reviews the influence of surrealists and dadaists without missing the historical joke: "They all wanted to destroy culture . . . and now they're part of our heritage." Arthur Koestler, a leading intellectual and novelist of the '30s and '40s, sounds weary and detached. "I'm vice president of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society," says the author of Darkness at Noon...
Democrats must ignore such nonsense. It is absurd to think that the Reagan Administration will be any more interested in arms control now than it has been for the last six years. On the contrary, Reagan has responded to this crisis by setting back arms control even further. In just the last week he exceeded the limits of the Salt II Treaty, voluntarily adhered to since 1979, apparently hoping that it would shift attention from the scandal...