Word: claptrap
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...called Red Limit Line, which runs parallel to the ocean border of North Korea, creating a five-kilometer "no fishing" zone. But sometimes they do: the residents of Yeonpyeong Island consider the Golden Sea to be part of their birthright and they view the Red Limit Line as political claptrap. "It's absolutely meaningless when we are fishing," says Choi Ryul, kneeling near the island's lighthouse to sketch a diagram of the fishing grounds for a visitor. "There are more crabs across the Red Limit Line...
...history demands that one be aware of the deeper world as well as the wider. For the period in question, America has been hydroplaning on the present, creating and devouring a culture consisting of relentless ephemera. The intellectual so-called life became deconstructionist game playing, politics became claptrap, "globalization" became internationalism for shoppers. Our superpowerhood fed feelings of omnipotence and self-righteousness (remember the "City on a Hill"?), which in turn created a false sense of immunity. On Sept. 11, airplanes crashed into two cities on a hill...
...acquaintance slithers into some self-aggrandizing prevarication. I write, LIAR! A nice, honest moment occurs in the new, good movie Traffic when the U.S. drug czar, Michael Douglas, falters in the middle of a false and insincere speech, and you can see his conscience writing marginalia on his claptrap. [If Catherine Zeta-Jones changed her name to Rita and married Derek Jeter, would she be Rita Zeta-Jeter...
...straight shot at Gore's central weakness, the impression he gives voters that he doesn't quite know who he is. True populists who were sick of Clinton's slushy Third Way claptrap love all that fighting talk. But if they really want action, it's Nader who's proposing a Marshall Plan for the inner cities and an $8.50 minimum wage. Instead Gore promises tax credits for college and making that commute a little easier and a prescription-drug entitlement for every grandma. But the gentle program aimed right at the swing voters gets lost because they...
...straight shot at Gore's central weakness, the impression he gives voters that he doesn't quite know who he is. True populists who were sick of Clinton's slushy Third Way claptrap love all that fighting talk. But if they really want action, it's Nader who's proposing a Marshall Plan for the inner cities and an $8.50 minimum wage. Instead Gore promises tax credits for college and making that commute a little easier and a prescription-drug entitlement for every grandma. But the gentle program aimed right at the swing voters gets lost because they...