Word: blunderer
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Mistake two: the ideal panel for literary prizes is a group of harmless but well-read drudges who are happy with modest honorariums and the free coffee and doughnuts served at meetings. The Turner people made the blunder of assuming that prestigious judges would confer glitter on the new awards. They assembled, at $10,000 a pop, a blue-ribbon panel including not only Styron, Matthiessen and Bradbury but Nadine Gordimer and Carlos Fuentes as well...
Until now, Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder has been the most visible noncandidate, crisscrossing the country giving speeches, wooing deep pockets in Hollywood and devising a catchy slogan -- "the New Mainstream." He's even survived what might have been a fatal blunder after flying on a state-owned aircraft to visit former model Patricia Kluge, recently divorced from one of the wealthiest men in the U.S. For good measure, Wilder appointed Kluge, star of the soft-porn movie Nine Ages of Nakedness, to the board of visitors of the University of Virginia. But running in a race without challengers means never...
...unlikely to face soon, or ever, another combination of a cause so clear that it unites a mighty coalition; ideal terrain for high-tech warfare; a dispirited and war-weary enemy army; an almost total lack of opposition in the air; and an adversary, Saddam, who made nearly every blunder in the book...
...frequent allusions in the West to Saddam's "paranoia" thus make his behavior seem more complicated than it really is. He does not have to fantasize enemies; he has inherited and made enough to last several lifetimes. His invasion of Iran in 1980 is often cited as a headstrong blunder. True, Saddam could not have foreseen the initial defeats and the debilitating eight- year war that would follow. But hindsight suggests that he would probably have provoked Iran into battle even if he had known all the consequences at the outset. From his point of view, the alternative was worse...
Perhaps the most vulnerable of the abandoned people were the mentally ill, who moved through the cities like a great muttering army, foraging, frightening, fearful. In a stunning social blunder, patients were released from public institutions and given no place to go -- no halfway houses, no local clinics, no community care. Between 1960 and 1984, the population in mental institutions fell from 544,000 to 134,000. But deinstitutionalization alone did not create the homeless problem. Many released patients survived for a time in single-room-occupancy hotels, where they at least had a fixed address and could receive monthly...