Word: contemptable
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...administrator, Anne Gorsuch, attracted the attention of two congressional subcommittees, which began investigating charges that the EPA had made "sweetheart" deals with polluting companies and delayed cleanups for political reasons. When Gorsuch refused in December to turn over subpoenaed documents pertaining to 160 Superfund sites, she was cited for contempt of Congress-the first time in history for a Cabinet-level official...
...embarrassed White House moved to contain the image spill, launching its own probe of the EPA and proposing a compromise to try to settle the contempt case against Gorsuch. But it could do little to muffle the echoes of earlier Capital scandals: whining paper shredders, charges of lying under oath, mysterious erasures on subpoenaed documents, leaked memos and harassment of whistle blowers. Problems began for Lavelle soon after she assumed the $67,200-a-year EPA post ten months ago. Ambitious but short on administrative skills, "she came into the agency like a Mack truck," said one former EPA official...
...conservative constituents. Wrote Columnist William Safire, who in the past has supported Reagan: "The themeless pudding called this year's State of the Union address was a series of banalities intended to ingratiate the President with his political opposition; instead, this worst of Reagan speeches invited the grinning contempt it received...
...biographer occasionally lapses into the tone of a prattling Sunday school teacher, creating a book with little sympathy for its subject. His assertion, for example, that Johnson's will to dominate arose out of his contempt for his parents, who "stuck by their ideals" and failed, does a disservice to the complex man he seeks to analyze. Caro insists that Johnson's conversion of a secret college social club into a political power on the Southwest texas campus revealed in the man a deviousness, a just for secrecy, and "a will of steel" plotting to "not only snatch existing power...
...tribute that vice pays to virtue, then furtiveness is the true outlaw's salute to the force of law-and-order. The red-light runner, however, shows no respect whatever for the social rules, and society cannot help being harmed by any repetitious and brazen display of contempt for the fundamentals of order...