Word: discerner
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...unfinished and unfocused business in the American agenda, and it will not go away either with the appointment of a Black to the Supreme Court or the passage of a civil rights bill. Sex and our adolescent fascination with it remain at the heart of our inability to discern the needs and rights of women and homosexuals and their place in society...
...consistency of buildings' cornice lines and materials. They've measured the optimal distances between houses across the street and next door, figured out just what encourages walking (narrow streets, parked cars, meaningful destinations) and reckoned the outer limit of a walkable errand (a quarter mile). They have tried to discern, beyond surface style, exactly what makes deeply charming places deeply charming...
Which does not take Bush off the hook. He utterly failed to discern the line between military intervention and humanitarian aid. He could have justified rejecting the first without forgoing the second. His unconscionable silence reflected a recurring problem of his foreign policy. The White House apparently believes the public will not understand decisions taken for hard- boiled reasons of national interest; it thinks those reasons must be given a pious cloak. The U.S. launched the gulf war in part to safeguard oil supplies, in part to protect allies and punish a naked act of aggression -- all of which should...
...slow to discern Saddam's intentions, Saddam was worse at understanding the U.S. He knew little of America and drew many a false conclusion. U.S. Ambassador Glaspie told State Department colleagues how Saddam had marveled at some earthworks constructed in Iraq by Vietnamese workers. Saddam had been amazed that a Third World people could defeat a superpower and may have been emboldened by the thought. He seemed to repeatedly conclude from America's experience in the Vietnam War that the U.S. lacked will. "He thought he knew more about us than we knew about ourselves, and that was ultimately...
...Arnett slaved away in his hotel room in Baghdad, providing what was then the only--albeit censored--reports from inside Iraq, he obviously hadn't forgotten the fairer pleasures of American academia. If you look carefully at a post-war photograph printed in a recent Boston Globe, you can discern the writing on Arnett's partially-obscured sweatshirt: "Harvard and Radcliffe...