Word: flaw
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Canada's 14th Prime Minister, Lester Bowles Pearson, was never quite comfortable as a public person. The trouble was, as he once recalled, "I was never able to make a platitude sound like a pronouncement, or an indiscretion sound like a platitude." It was a forgivable flaw. But it prevented Pearson, while head of Canada's Liberal Party, from ever winning a majority in Parliament. It also helped make his term as Prime Minister (from 1963 to 1968) one of the most boisterous and fractious in Canadian history. Yet even before he died last week of cancer...
...figure out what the viewer already knows. Looking and acting more like a befuddled sheep dog than a crafty bloodhound, Columbo (Peter Falk) sets to work. The viewer works with him, wincing, sighing and occasionally sitting up in excitement as Columbo stumbles step by step to the tiny flaw that will unravel the murder's protective coat...
...defensiveness; the limits of human gesture amazed her. "Everybody has this thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way, and that's what people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw...Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way, but there's a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can't help people knowing about you." Arbus probed that disjuncture...
...profile of George McGovern leans too far the other way-it is so uncritical as to seem reverential. Where it does point up what it considers a flaw, such as McGovern's backing of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, it suggests that it can be forgiven as being "politically realistic," an excuse granted to few other subjects. The language of the profile is laced with panegyric phrases like "that kind of humility" and "unassuming preacher-like authority." Those who know McGovern well find him neither humble nor unassuming...
...present system is a scandal, perhaps the fatal flaw in American democracy," declares Los Angeles Fund Raiser Harold Willens. "It's the nastiest thing in all of politics, and it may destroy our whole political system," contends Missouri Judge George W. Lehr. "There's a smell, an odor about it, and unless things change the system cannot survive," insists Larry O'Brien, campaign manager for George McGovern. Says Senator Edward Kennedy: "It is the most flagrant single abuse in our democracy, the unconscionable power of money...