Word: earnest
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Clinton's supporters argue he should get credit for not giving a faux-earnest Apology on Demand. But why would Clinton now, after seven months of sustained lying, suddenly choose honesty? His Slick Willie side has always known that the most important quality a politician can have is sincerity. And no politician is better at faking it than he is. In 1980 Clinton was a failed one-term Governor until he apologized for raising car-tag fees and got his wife to drop that fancy "Rodham" business with her name. In 1992 he became the Comeback Kid, miraculously saving...
Last week what Berezovsky apparently got was the hide of Sergei Kiriyenko, the earnest young reformer Yeltsin installed in March, whose solutions for salvaging Russia's failing banks, currency and international credibility entailed a well-intentioned assault on the freebooting ways of the oligarchy. Chernomyrdin's return, says Andrei Illarionov, director of the Institute of Economic Analysis, is the result of a "brilliant scheme," under way for months, by the tycoons to return to power the one man they believed could protect their interests. Men in the Chernomyrdin camp acknowledge that Berezovsky played a major role in encouraging the cautious...
...Small Things has been translated--it's easy to feel that the all-purpose label of "Anglo-Indian" writing covers a multitude of sins and that too many serious craftsmen are being massed under the Orientalist tent. Abraham Verghese's vision, full of the earnest self-inquiry of a foreigner taking America to his heart, might seem as alien to Romesh Gunesekera as Gunesekera's wrenching, elegiac tales, fragrant with the sea air of his lost Sri Lanka, might be to Verghese. Yet the two of them, an Ethiopian-born Indian Christian now living in Texas and a Sinhalese exile...
...shockingly sympathetic, if in a flinty way. Lane, 60, is straight shooting without being superior and so honest that he describes his motive for doing the show this way: "If it's successful, I could make a lot of money." Lane's world feels small, rational and exceedingly earnest...
Almost as earnest is the father of judge shows, Joseph Wapner. From 1981 to 1993, his sessions of The People's Court entertained with silliness, not heated conflict. On Judge Wapner's Animal Court, the 78-year-old magistrate is back with his trusty bailiff, Rusty Burrell, only this time every case involves animals. Wapner's careful, evidence-obsessive yet laid-back style is only enhanced by a caged chow sitting in front of the defendant. "These are very serious cases, and people get very emotional about their animals," he says, "more emotional than they do about money or people...