Word: edsel
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...lack vital data about the attacking missiles and about ABM performance," says Wiesner, who calls Sentinel "that Edsel of ABM's." "So we just pick some numbers that seem rational and we use them to make whatever point serves our purpose." Ted Kennedy quotes the Budget Bureau's Richard Stubbing, who evaluated $40 billion worth of aircraft and missile projects initiated since 1955 and concluded that "less than 40% of the effort produced systems with acceptable electronic performance." The implication, of course, is that if technology cannot perfect relatively simple devices, it seems highly improbable that the infinitely complex...
...Edsel Margin III and Karl Shapiro agree with millions of other solidifying citizens that America is in the sticky clutches of its children. It makes these two men angry; it makes them nervous; it gives them sour stomachs...
They do, however, differ in an important way. Edsel Margin III is Author Frederick Crews's caricature of a conservative political commentator who confronts the world as if it were a meet between the Yale and Harvard debating teams. A member of America's processed aristocracy, the third Edsel not only has the courage of his convictions but the confidence of his accent and vocabulary as well...
...Edsel Margin III, one of the three commissioners, is, like Karl Shapiro, apocalyptic and apoplectic, but he has a well-defined target: Benjamin Spock -not the war hater, but the baby lover. Margin creatively misinterprets Dr. Spock's book Baby and Child Care as a blueprint for totally permissive child-rearing, a Communist Manifesto of the U.S. infantocracy, the cause of all the troubles from Yalta to the Yippies...
...intellectual wired into the highest power sources, he has written a book entitled Think Clear or Die. He wants to apply systems analysis and game theory to the national diaper rash; yet he has the touch of a hip nightclub comic: "I hate to break the news to you, Edsel baby, but thrift went out with Little Orphan Annie and her anal-retentive boxtops...