Word: discreditation
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...torture has come at huge costs to American credibility and the morale and psychology of our intelligence agencies. If we're going to pay those costs, we ought to know what we're getting. A thorough clearing of the air will help discredit the idea that we either torture terrorists or become victims. This false choice is played out on shows like 24, leaving people with the notion that had the FBI somehow caught one of the hijackers in the hours leading up to Sept. 11, torture would have led to the arrests of the 18 others before those planes...
...Bush’s tax policy, health-care plans, climate-change proposals, education programs, or foreign policy. Reading The Crimson, however, you’d think the president’s policies broke the economy by themselves. Bush-hating revisionists use the unpopularity of our 43rd president to discredit conservative policies in general. But Bush’s failure to regulate financial and housing markets should not be confused with his success in economic growth, trade, education, and health care...
...acquire comes only from a rigorous and mathematical inquiry into nature. The tenets of theology or the moral virtues—the most important knowledge for the soul—may have had greater priority in previous societies. Yet the innovation of our age has been to discredit such matters as necessarily spurious and speculative and thus not the subject of real intellectual activity. What matters to moderns is the data—and in its slavish devotion to the data, science gained its intellectual pre-eminence...
...Until this week, critics of so-called gay marriage used that same undemocratic argument to try to discredit the new right, which is why the Vermont legislature's April 7 vote to legalize marriage for gay couples mattered so much: it was the first time in U.S. history that a first-branch institution, one that has to face voters in short order, actually granted equal marriage rights. (The California legislature has twice voted for marriage equality, but advocates couldn't muster enough votes to override Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's vetoes). Lesbian and gay Americans, who will celebrate the 40th anniversary...
...seriously imagine that Washington will alter its support for Israel, but Khamenei, by citing one of the ideological pillars of the Islamic Revolution (hostility to "the Zionist regime"), was in effect admonishing Iranian leaders to keep the U.S. at arm's length. (The Supreme Leader's efforts to discredit the U.S. initiative by invoking Washington's ties with Israel could have been helped by Israeli President Shimon Peres' issuing a scolding New Year's message of his own to Iran's people hours after Obama's.) (See pictures of Iranian society, caught between tradition and modernity...