Word: adding
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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DURING AN ERA WHEN AN African American portraying a doctor on TV was a news event, veteran actor Percy Rodrigues--whose 30 years of film, TV and booming voice-over work included narrating the famously eerie ad campaign for 1975's Jaws--resolutely fought against typecasting blacks. One result: his breakthrough 1968 role as neurosurgeon Harry Miles on TV's Peyton Place, which influenced a generation of artists and inspired this headline in the Los Angeles Times: A DOCTOR'S ROLE FOR NEGRO ACTOR...
Welcome to the wonderful world of umbrage, the new language of American politics. You would not have thought that the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly would be so sensitive. Sticks and stones and so on. Yet they all seem to have taken one look at that ad and fainted dead away. And when they came round, they demanded - as if with one voice (or at least as if with one list of talking points) - that every Democratic presidential candidate must "condemn" this shocking, shocking document...
...ad is pretty tough, and the pun on the general's name is pretty witless. You could argue that since the verb betray and the noun traitor have the same root, the ad is accusing the head of American forces in Iraq of treason. The ad can also be interpreted - more plausibly if you consider the rest of the text - merely as questioning the general's honesty, not his patriotism. But whatever your interpretation of the ad, all the gasping for air and waving of scented handkerchiefs among the war's most enthusiastic supporters is pretty comical...
...phony, of course. The war's backers are obviously delighted to have this ad from which they can make an issue. They wouldn't trade it for a week in Anbar province (a formerly troubled area of Iraq that is now, thanks to us, an Eden of peace and tranquillity where barely a car bomb disturbs the perfumed silence - or so they say). These days, mock outrage is used by every side of every dispute. It's fair enough to criticize something your opponent said while secretly thanking your lucky stars that he said it. The fuss over this MoveOn.org...
...Republican front runner, Rudy Giuliani, is another tough guy who has seized the opportunity to reveal his easily bruised soft side. He is running TV commercials saying Hillary Clinton "stood by silently" while MoveOn.org ran its despicable ad. Another way of saying this would be that she had nothing to do with the ad. But Rudy accuses her of "joining with" MoveOn.org and "attacking" General Petraeus, although the only evidence he can muster for this accusation is a clip from Clinton telling the general at a hearing that his reports of progress in the war "really require the willing suspension...