Word: asserting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...until the second half of the book do the authors reach the heart of their argument and the most interesting material in their book. The Strategic Defense Initiative, they assert, is an impractical, useless project. Only its usefulness to various special interest groups keeps it alive: the Europeans crave the billion dollar high-tech defense contracts SDI will bring them; arms-controllers such as Paul Nitze want a billion dollar bargaining chip; and right-wingers led by Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle see it as a billion dollar way to violate the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and jettison...
Which makes the "they can't win" refrain somewhat ironic. It comes most often from precisely those people in Congress who are constantly fighting to cut aid to the contras, reducing their supplies to the barest minimum, or trying to eliminate assistance altogether. Having disarmed the resistance, they then assert that it cannot win, and then cite the inability to win as a reason for disarming it. A neat circle...
Still, there is in the midst of this strange scene some stirring of calm competency trying to assert itself, first and foremost from Nancy Reagan. When West Wing concerns began to rise because the sequestered invalid was being judged too dotty to resume his duties, she ignored those who urged her to push him out front before he was well enough. "Too many people I know who have had this operation have tried to do too much too soon," she said. "They had to go back to the hospital. I'm not going to have that happen now." That settled...
...claimed that the Holocaust was not really a genocide. These historians argue that the Allies have used the Holocaust as a weapon to subordinate the German people in the years since World War II. Using historical events such as Soviet massacres of Armenians and the Kulachi, the German historians assert that the interpretation the Holocaust should be revised. They contend that their nation was not guilty of anything in particular and that the moral persecution has to stop...
Neither, of course, could quite match Reagan's mastery of television. Nor did their well-worn looks do much to cast their party as the face of the future. But their very lack of New Age video appeal made them seem convincing as leaders of a Congress that will assert itself as an equal branch of Government. Now they face their real challenge, which, as Wright said of the President, involves not rhetoric but reality. Can they present an alternative to Reagan's agenda that is not merely a call for more spending programs financed through higher taxes and dangerous...