Word: cravener
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...both sides, the leadership, such as it is, grows more evasive, craven and empty. In a war of victims, no one plays the grownup. Among the Palestinians, effective moral authority now has a median age of 14 or 15 and a good throwing arm. Fathers and grandfathers have signed over their moral duties to the children in the streets. The traditional patriarchy begins to disintegrate. The Palestine Liberation Organization still serves as banner and facade, but many Palestinians believe that it is increasingly feckless, corrupt and out of touch. The failures of leadership on either side of the struggle collaborate...
...dithers over a bill to create rapid-response cleanup teams. Even the President admits the need for a budget-and-tax compromise, but a heralded bipartisan summit has so far failed to produce even an agreement on how large the federal deficit really is. Flagrant political scandals -- most notably, craven sellouts by lawmakers to the savings and loan industry -- raise new calls for campaign reforms, but the effort is going nowhere. The decline of the nation's schools produces gusts of rhetoric but not one serious education reform...
Their slap-and-stroke routine extends to Oval Office meetings, where Bush is unfailingly gracious, whether with earnest junior staffers or craven special pleaders. It is Sununu's role to wring useful information out of unctuous presentations and rebut one-sided arguments, and he delights in it. Bush clearly relishes the edge and the rigor that Sununu provides. "He has made a lot of friends for our Administration," Bush says, "on the basis of competence, sheer competence...
...mean proximity?" He insisted on a quick trip to Webster's New World Dictionary on a stand in his lush Times office, furnished with the look of a turn-of-the-century men's club. The verdict: the two words are interchangeable. But there was nothing craven about this language maven. Instead, he said with verve, "Now both of us know something we didn't know a moment...
...will go blithely on his way, until the Big Test. "Everyone figures there will be a Supreme Court vacancy before '92," says a White House aide. "And that will be the ball game. At that point, no matter how many pro- abortion bills the President has vetoed or how craven he has been in his support of the right-to-lifers, it will all come down to how he handles that nomination...