Word: feckless
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...everyone wants to be just like him. He's sitting there, unflappable and detached and looking sharp in a Yohji Yamamoto suit amid the third-rate chaos swirling around him. That's how most Japanese want to see themselves. Their nation has become an economic and political farce. Feckless, forgettable Prime Ministers come and go. The moribund economy has come to resemble more the surreal vision of Salvador Dali than the sound blueprint of Adam Smith. And for the first time since World War II, the average Japanese faces the prospect of a diminishing standard of living. It's third...
...foreigners entered the E.U. illegally last year, five times the number in 1994. And as the demand to enter Europe has widened, so have the opportunities for traffickers who would profit from these masses on the move. Scores of immigrants now put their lives in the hands of feckless smugglers, with tragic results. Hundreds die crossing the Mediterranean into Spain each year; last week the corpses of 10 more North African immigrants washed up on Spain's southern shores...
...When Bill was a boy, his mother installed him in the master bedroom of the house, while she and Bill's feckless stepfather took the guest room. The $750,000-a-year Carnegie Hall Tower penthouse office suite with views of Central Park involves the same droit de junior. It's an Arkansas Nero effect. When the Emperor Nero entered his Golden House for the first time, he inspected the statue of himself, 120 feet high; he admired the enclosed lake, the pillared arcade that stretched for a mile, the dining rooms paved with porphyry, and ceilings of gold...
...Americans seem to be addicted to something that is bad for them--booze, cigarettes, excessive getting and spending. Drugs, naturally, are at the top of the hell list--they kill, they addle, they lie at the heart of a vast criminal enterprise, and the feckless "war" against them mostly wastes billions of public dollars every year. Traffic is the epic of our despair on this topic, an attempt to gather all the strands of the issue in one place and implicitly show how they entangle people at every level of society...
...made them roll over and play dead, threw the invisibility cloak over the congressional wing of his party and made them disappear. Stripped of every winning Republican issue--the cold war, crime, the economy--he proceeded to run on Democratic ones--education, health care, Social Security. Lampooned as a feckless frat boy, he ran a more disciplined race than we have seen in years; he made his inexperience a virtue, his vagueness a shield, his sins a sign of sincerity...