Word: assail
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When the existence of Richard Nixon's self-destructive, secret taping system was dramatically revealed early one afternoon at the Senate Watergate hearings in July 1973, Democrats rose in righteous wrath to assail the President. "It's an outrage," fumed House Speaker Carl Albert. "It's so fantastic as to be almost beyond belief," stormed AFL-CIO President George Meany. "A violation of privacy," snapped Nixon's defeated 1972 election opponent, George McGovern. And when Nixon's defenders suggested that he was only doing what John F. Kennedy had quietly practiced, Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger...
...unrealistic. For one thing, assigning specific blame for atrocities can be difficult in a chaotic situation like that in El Salvador. For another, the congressional directive ignored the question of murders carried out by the left-wing guerrillas. But as various human rights organizations began to assail the U.S. for supporting the Duarte government, the Administration took a tough stand, arguing that El Salvador occupied an important place in an East-West struggle for dominance in Latin America. As Haig put it, "The threat to democracy from opponents of peaceful change is particularly acute in El Salvador. The Duarte government...
...There is a feeling that it is a bum idea and ought to be changed," says Wyoming Congressman Dick Cheney, chairman of the Republican Policy Committee. But, surprisingly, the leasing provisions are defended by some of the very economists who most harshly assail last year's giveaways. Brookings Institution Economist Barry Bosworth grumbles about "all sorts of crazy things" written into the bill but says the leasing provisions will lead to "a reasonable redistribution of [corporate] wealth." Even Greenspan approves the idea. One possible compromise: forbidding the sale of tax benefits by companies like Occidental, which are profitable...
...bass drum shot shatters the air. The dirge-playing band leads the way up the road toward the cemetery, then separates from the casket. At first it retraces its route by drumbeat alone. Then the trumpet screams forth, the drummers swing out, belted choruses of The Second Line assail the sky. The crowd, most of it, becomes a blur of fidgeting feet, twisting torsos, bobbing heads. A corpulent man in an orange shirt spins and dips. An elderly woman executes a scampering step with the help of her cane. An open-shirted youth leaps to the hood...
...vigorous, unconventional action can scarcely be denied. If the U.S. economy is not quite on the brink of "calamity," it is at least riddled by inflation and battered by recurrent recessions that to gether are reducing national standards of living. The burden of proof is on those critics who assail the President's program to show that they have a convincing alternative...