Word: fiascos
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...days after the bombing of the Beirut Marine barracks, we invaded Grenada, a tiny, tiny island whose exact problems and import to the world are still entirely mysterious. But it was 1983, the economy was recovering, and the fiasco in Lebanon was not that big a problem. A few thousand American troops, a few casualties, one terrible Clint Eastwood movie...
...consider the CIA. To those who knew of it at all in 1963, it was still living off the glamour of its wartime OSS (Office of Strategic Services) legend -- the dashing blue-blooded oh-so-social spies, American James Bonds. Even the black eye of the Bay of Pigs fiasco could be attributed to Kennedy's failure of nerve rather than to the Harvard and Yale ole boys who drew up the plans. From almost the very beginning, the CIA has been a focus of Kennedy- assassinati on conspiracy theories (bitterness by some agents over Kennedy's Bay of Pigs...
Lacking any answers to these problems, Bush has reacted to his domestic unpopularity with a characteristic move: an assault on Congress. The president likes to blame the Democratically controlled legislative body for everything from the recession and quotas to the savings and loans fiasco. Last Thursday, Bush viciously condemned Congress, calling it "a privileged class of rulers who stand above...
Americans in the future may enjoy replaying the fiasco of the Thomas confirmation hearings: primal, defining national theater. The drama had layers -- legal, political, cultural, racial, ethical, sexual. The hearings were a bad moment for middle-aged white men. The Senate Judiciary Committee sat arrayed in its Caucasian glory, like Muppets of Bomfog and Claghorn, each Senator more confused and senescent and miserable and lost to pomposity than the last -- a row of flushed egos that said goodbye to dignity and intelligence sometime during the Eisenhower years...
...sterile now and incapable of a fresh thought or an authentic feeling. Better real ads and comics than exhausted "fine" art about them. That is one reason why our fin-de-siecle, at least in the domain of the visual arts, is turning into such a cultural fiasco...