Word: direness
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...railed against Edwards' liberalism and his penchant for gambling and womanizing and trading government jobs for campaign contributions. But in the end, the bumper sticker won the day: VOTE FOR THE CROOK: IT'S IMPORTANT. Concluding that electing a bigot would be too costly to a state in dire economic straits, voters gave Edwards 60% of the vote. The turnout was an astonishing...
Though the influx has ushered in a vibrant multicultural society, it has also had dire effects. Smog, from smokestacks and refineries but most of all from the 25 million vehicles on the freeways, was already fouling the air in Los Angeles; now it has billowed east as far as San Bernardino. In the inland reaches, near Los Angeles, from Burbank to Riverside, it is not unusual to schedule high school track and football practice at night after the evening cool dispels the pollution. Glendora, a middle-class town in the San Gabriel Valley, at times has visibility of scarcely...
...DIRE STRAITS: ON EVERY STREET (Warner Bros.). Likely you've caught the first single, Calling Elvis, on the radio. The rest of the record is similar: edgy, mysterious, insinuating, with some typically masterly guitar work by Mark Knopfler. Dire Straits is the most stylishly surreptitious group in all of rock: the music seems to drift off into the unconscious as soon as you hear it, leaving the impression that it's been part of your life forever -- or at least since Elvis...
...Dinesh D'Souza's book Illiberal Education hovers high on the best-seller lists. Its keynote is the dire warning that "an academic and cultural revolution is under way at American universities...the fruit of a coherent ideology that seeks to thrust the university into the vanguard of social reform and establish a model 'multicultural community...
...awful prospect of sending men and women into battle will be comforted and inspired by his example. It is a pity that such of his predecessors in the White House as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, each bearing on his shoulders the burden of a nation in dire peril, should be forced by the Victorian ethic to forgo the solace of a good cry. And then there was General George Washington at Valley Forge, who reportedly cried as seldom as he lied...