Word: basest
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...Latham hadn't been long enough in the job to convince enough people he was ready for the big one. "A lot of people like John Howard," he adds. "I don't know why. But they do." Young father Scott Ison says the P.M. had appealed successfully to Australians' basest instincts, adding: "People would struggle to agree on one theme he believes in." Many are convinced that ads predicting interest rates would rise under Labor were decisive. "When you knock on thousands of doors," says the winning candidate for Prospect, Chris Bowen, "you get a sense of things. People wanted...
...regarding cost-containment measures. His knowledge about many issues, even domestic ones, is sketchy at best. He once told me that the school-voucher movement was Southern, white and conservative, even though it is predominantly Northern, urban and African American. He isn't above political opportunism of the basest sort - he has changed his position on free trade to suit Iowa's protectionist labor skates, and a cynic might argue that his position on Iraq was a clever response to a market void. But Dean is a master of the snappy formulation. He tells audiences, for example, that the President...
Overnight, his speech sparked a media firestorm that played to the basest fears of Americans swept up in a frightening cold war and triggered loyalty oaths, blacklists and personal betrayals that cost an estimated 10,000 Americans their jobs and some shattered innocents their lives. In 1954 he turned his bullying on the U.S. Army in widely watched television hearings that ultimately exposed McCarthy for the fraudulent demagogue he was. He died a broken alcoholic three years later, but his name remains synonymous with the most reviled style of American politics. --By Johanna McGeary
Jerry Springer, who gained fame by pandering to the basest aspects of human nature, is being adopted by purveyors of high culture. For one of his first productions, the newly installed director of the Royal National Theater in London has chosen an opera based on Springer's talk show. A version of the opera debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland this summer and is being reworked for an April opening in London. The new opera is expected to include such crowd pleasers as a kick line of Ku Klux Klansmen and a diaper fetishist. One hopes that this...
...with the flighty transience of popular music. It's why one cringes when, on warm spring afternoons, rock seeps into the Yard from open dorm windows. It's why, during Take Back the Night week, former Cliffies' dancing to Madonna's "Express Yourself" atop Widener's steps seems the basest possible blasphemy. After all, every music has its place--blues its dimly lit bar, opera its ornate hall, reggae its lonely beach; popular music belongs neither in cathedrals nor in the academic equivalents thereof...