Word: corrupts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...think there's been enough killing and dying for a corrupt regime. That doesn't mean that I wouldn't be willing to die for something that represents the best that we want to protect in the world."-Eleanor McGovern on whether she would be willing to die for the Thieu regime, as Julie Eisenhower and Pat Nixon had said they would...
Maybe, say the experts, McGovern's frontal assault on the scandals will touch a well of slumbering outrage. But his stridency contains its own backlash. His charge that the Nixon Administration is the most corrupt in the Republic's history is dubious. But something is iridescently wrong there. This Administration's record will, one suspects, find its historical place in the rather short line of federal manipulation and political skulduggery, big and small, that burgeoned with Ulysses Grant. The gold, whisky and railroad manipulations in the unsuspecting Grant's time besmirched his reputation for a century...
...exaggerated, and outright Marxists are generally lukewarm about McGovern for just this reason. It is rather students at the leftward border of the establishment who wear McGovern buttons and, echoing the artful words of their champion, indignantly charge that the present administration is "the most immoral and corrupt" in our history. Still, vague general sentiments aside, one wonders which of his specific positions are so attractive...
...fact, the McGovern candidacy is most irritating because of its moral pretensions. We have, for instance, his charge that our relatively free economy is corrupt because it has not abolished scarcity; and there are others. Most dangerous is McGovern's use of moralistic rhetoric without any clear notion of morality. To choose morality in politics as one's ultimate goal while proclaiming one's own prejudices as morality is bad enough without varying those prejudices from day to day. McGovern's every statement is couched in moral terms; those who oppose him are evil. Such extremism tends to breed...
...EVENTUALLY one comes to the war in Vietnam, which grounds all of McGovern's charges of immorality. The American people have tired of the war since Nixon's less corrupt predecessor refused to disclose it eight years ago. But it is hardly clear that McGovern can claim that immediate withdrawal has support in morality. Perhaps to abandon our allies in Asia without regard for their future is not the moral course but the expedient one. Doubtless thousands of students disagree with this analysis, but to refuse it they must apply more argument to the problem rather than pious phrases...