Word: cliffs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Likewise it was Dole who watched silently last fall while the Republican field marshal Newt Gingrich marched his troops to the cliff of a government shutdown and over it. Dole went along, partly because he believed in stapling Clinton to the bargaining table and partly to keep his right wing happy. But by mid-December, Dole was talking to people in Iowa and New Hampshire nearly every day, and he could see that this was silly. Paying people not to come to work? Not paying people to come to work...
...premise behind the futuristic "Escape From L.A." is promising but proves unfulfilling. It is the early 21st century and Los Angeles has degenerated into a center of immorality and sin. The new president-for-life (Cliff Robertson) declares the United States a land of moral superiority--no smoking, no red meat, no freedom of religion. When a massive earthquake strikes southern California separating Los Angeles physically from the mainland, the president declares the new island outside America's borders and deports all immoral citizens of the U.S. to the City of Angels...
...keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye, and all," he says. "Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around--nobody big, I mean--except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff--I mean, if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just...
What all these moves have in common--and there will be a parade of such initiatives from now until November--is that they are designed to cast the President in effect as the energetic young man standing in the rye, protecting our children from running over the cliff. It is a strategy designed to recast the image of government: instead of the supercilious bureaucrat with mountains of paper and regulations, government now becomes the safety-patrol volunteer, the lifeguard, the friendly cop on the beat buying a lost child an ice cream cone before calling his worried parents...
...novels have been called Dickensian, largely on the basis of the first one, which is jammed with plot and characters and ends with the cliff-hanger of Annelies' legal kidnapping. But as the series continues, Minke's adventures--he becomes a journalist and publishes a successful newspaper in opposition to the Dutch rule--serve almost entirely as the framework for an endless series of questing dialogues. Sourly or hopefully, with colleagues or adversaries, Minke explores the nature of colonialism and capitalism, the psychology of police power, the role of women, the techniques of political organization, the efficacy of boycotts...