Word: basest
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...defensive I sound, and that brings me to my main point: Fetishism is a problem. A superficial preference for black males or Asian females or any other group grounded in stereotypes can and does offend deeply. Such a racial ranking of desirable (mostly sexual) partners represents ignorance of the basest kind...
White House campaign officials insist Bush did not let election-year politics dictate his decision, but Ira Kurzban, lawyer for Miami's Haitian Refugee Center, believes otherwise. "The Haiti policy," he says, "plays to the basest part of the Republican Party, the anti-alien group, the racists, to keep them from crossing over to Ross Perot...
...tell the truth, I think they're probably right. I remember the vicious crowd waving signs outside serial killer Ted Bundy's execution--signs of the "Burn, Bundy, Burn" and "Bundy BBQ" variety. Even more than Faces of Death, killing bad guys appeals to our basest instincts. That's why Bernie Goetz became such a hero. That's why Gov. Douglas Wilder (D-VA), an opponent of the death penalty, has decided that his political ambitions would be destroyed by granting clemency to convicts on Death...
Horton fit Atwater's unstated but obvious aim of playing to the basest instincts of the electorate. This was the trademark of his savvy political career...
...more satisfying than its literal fulfillment. If the demagogue-bard says the infidel will swim in his own blood, then words have pre-empted the work of armies. Ambiguity has an ancient history in the West, but the Middle East has its special genius for mirage. There, the dreariest, basest impulses go dressed up in poetry. Aggressive greed may swagger around as jihad. "Arab dignity and honor" shine in the mind with a radiant life of their own, forever beleaguered and violated and crying for revenge -- visions really, not things to be struggled toward, to be earned...