Word: blundered
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that principle too often in the past, but the principle prevails. Add the rights of property, free speech, freedom of religion, and a few other advantages that Britain and Amer ica have developed over the years, and you have the central reasons that if these two nations continue to blunder through history, at least they will do so together...
...last week, Denis Healey, the pro-American shadow Foreign Secretary of Britain's Labor Party, warned: "There is a growing feeling in Europe that the U.S. is drifting into a very dangerous posture in Central America. Armed intervention by American forces in these countries would be a historic blunder." Actually, of course, armed intervention is politically close to impossible, which is one reason why tough Administration rhetoric does not get anywhere...
...does not give a particular hoot about the subject. The object is to dazzle with language. "The art of speaking well is being lost," says Oliphant sincerely. "We are preserving that art." To Bob Gilbert, of Princeton, authentic passion is a tactical blunder. "All my worst rounds," he says, "come when I really believe what I'm saying. You get emotional, irrational." "You need arrogance," adds Kidd, a visiting New Zealander known for his sly bluntness. "You've got to be cocky to throw all this b.s. around." One veteran of the circuit admits that the verbal showboating...
...President caught in a political blunder can always resort to a familiar gambit to diffuse criticism: mixing candor and contrition. That was the tactic adopted by Ronald Reagan last week as he tried to stem the anger caused by the decision to allow tax exemptions for private schools practicing racial discrimination...
...young man succeed, but nobody enjoys seeing him suffer either, so it was with eager pity that the nation watched David Stockman eat crow before the press last Thursday. Had Mr. Stockman talked less to the press earlier he would not be squirming now, but garrulity was not his blunder. Mr. Stockman's Administration-shaking mistake was not that he talked, but how he talked. He used a metaphor. Moreover, it was "a rotten, horrible, unfortunate metaphor," as he put it un-metaphorically in his news conference. Yet life would be no rosier for Mr. Stockman had his metaphor...