Word: cannot
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There is a widespread conviction that the regime cannot survive for long -- at best until the rice harvest early next year. The government has virtually no foreign reserves. Exports have almost vanished. Western governments and Japan have cut off all their assistance, which is necessary to supply the military and maintain the decrepit industrial plant, while ethnic insurgents are applying pressure along the borders. "Logically, the government cannot hold on," says a young Burmese intellectual. "Unfortunately, there's not much logic in this government...
Last week the legislation ran afoul of President Reagan. Stating that the bill "cannot be reconciled" with constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech, Reagan refused to sign it. His pocket veto infuriated lobbyists like Peggy Charren, president of Action for Children's Television, who called Reagan's refusal a form of "ideological child abuse." Democrat Edward Markey of Massachusetts, a co-sponsor of the House bill, said 20% of U.S. television stations exceed the proposed limits on commercials. He plans to reintroduce the measure next year and hopes for a more favorable response from the new Administration...
...Nicaraguan refugees pouring into Honduras once could count on shelter in U.N.-sponsored refugee camps. Now newcomers who are caught are forcibly returned. Hondurans, with an unemployment rate of about 40%, insist they cannot accommodate this job-hungry tide of dispossessed Nicaraguans. With 12,000 armed contras sitting in Honduran base camps, some Hondurans feel the U.S. has dragged them into a war that they never chose to fight. Though Washington understandably becomes annoyed when officials in Honduras and other Central American countries privately implore the U.S. to act tough with the Sandinistas but offer little public support...
Democracy is an optimistic faith, and the choice of a new President cannot help inspiring a flicker of faith. The victorious Bush spoke to these dreams when he said, "A campaign is a disagreement, and disagreements divide. But an election is a decision, and decisions clear the way for harmony and peace." In an odd way, the dispiriting shallowness of the campaign had the virtue of leaving no lasting scars on the nation's psyche. Because there were no great disagreements on fundamental issues and no clashing visions of an American future, there are no deep divisions difficult to reconcile...
Finally, Bush tends to lose concentration at times when he cannot be convinced his attention is required. Aides say that trait explains such "abnormalities" as his shockingly inert role in the Iran-contra affair. It also accounts, they say, for the marked improvement in his speaking style between the middle primaries, when Bush was not fully involved in political theater, and the postconvention period, when he appreciated that the stakes were high...