Word: contemptible
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Bush and Quayle are not perfect leaders, and the past four years have hardly been perfect years for America. However, it is time we asked ourselves how much of the current "leadership crisis" is due to our presumption that politicians are guilty until proven innocent, and that contempt for the government is a sign of intellectual superiority...
...sees rivals as evil conspirators to be crushed, and who pursues astonishingly meanspirited vendettas against anyone who crosses him, even in petty matters. Vice President Dan Quayle even warned that "it would be a very bad idea to replace a genuine statesman with some temperamental tycoon who has contempt for the Constitution of the United States...
...really resemble each other beyond their shared setting. Wolfe despises his characters and creates them in order to hold them up to ridicule, wriggling and in pain. McInerney cares deeply about the silly, grasping, ego-swollen pipsqueaks -- fairly decent, fairly normal people -- he invents. Wolfe's cold contempt gives the reader distance, a panoramic view of an ant colony. McInerney shows us human beings who feel wretched as they behave badly...
Grey calls those who treat Wood with benign contempt "jackals of bourgeois sensibility." And he's right. As critic Jim Morton notes, "If there is a 'worst film ever made,' it is one that is boring -- a sin Ed Wood Jr. is rarely guilty of." But there is a more melancholy irony to be found in Grey's interviews with the director's colleagues. Unlike most trashmeisters, Wood had radical messages for his audience: about sexual tolerance (Glen or Glenda), nuclear madness (Plan 9), parental smugness (The Sinister Urge). He was as dedicated to filmmaking as Welles or Kurosawa...
This line is not surprising coming from a political heir of Ronald Reagan, who voiced his contempt for public assistance with apocryphal stories of "welfare queens" driving Cadillacs. What is surprising is how many Democrats and liberals are sounding the same themes. Presumptive nominee Bill Clinton insists that "those on welfare move into the workplace" within two years. New Jersey Governor Jim Florio denounces the current welfare system as "morally bankrupt." Many state governments, meanwhile, are slashing benefits and throwing thousands off the rolls. "America has moved from a war on poverty to a war on the poor," says Yale...