Word: asterisk
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...even as they sing of "sadomasochism," to the real tensions that will someday entangle their own lives. It is refreshing for these corporate clients, seeking to cut loose and shed a little of their hostility over wine or vodka, to see that life can still be fun without an asterisk at the end. The Kroks know that they are charming, but they are, for the most part, just looking for applause and the invitation to sing one more, not to use their charm to ooze their way up a corporate ladder. It is charm for the sake of charm...
...boss was "exasperatingly stupid" in his personal life, McCurry told an audience of 200 at the University of Pittsburgh in his first public comments since leaving the White House. And although the President is "an enormously gifted and richly qualified leader for the nation," there will "always be an asterisk next to his name in the record books" because of the Lewinsky scandal...
...will never be paroled, even pending good behavior. He became the third Commander in Chief to face the ignominy of an official impeachment investigation--not as bad as Nixon; worse than Johnson, whose impeachment was pure political payback by his cranky congressional opposition. It will forever be the asterisk after Clinton's name, a game-show question in the year 2020: Name the third American President to endure an impeachment inquiry...
...human tragedy but a political one. "Will it hurt his poll numbers?" becomes the question, not how broken and scarred a spouse and children may be. With the press reveling in scandal (although we insist that we are not), even good people make bad excuses, searching for an asterisk to put beside their adultery ("It's old," "I was young," "It's over," "My wife forgave me"). The result is to "define adultery down" (with credit to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who argued six years ago that we were "defining deviancy down" by failing to be outraged by the social...
...some scrupulous folk, the news that for the past year McGwire has taken doses of androstenedione (which is either a muscle enhancer or Viagra in vitamin form) will forever place an ethical asterisk next to his achievement. Andro is legal in baseball--partly because the mouse men who run the game are unwilling to wrestle over drug policy with a balky and powerful players' union--but banned in other sports; last week the NFL suspended Paul Wiggins of the Pittsburgh Steelers for sampling andro over the summer. (Sosa was recently seen "hiding" a bottle of Flintstones vitamins in his locker...