Word: foolishness
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Alice is dumbstruck - "Did all the Blackwells think Charlie was incompetent and foolish? Did everyone?" She reflexively rises to his defense. "Charlie wasn't the runt of the litter," she tells herself. "He wasn't an idiot." Not an idiot, surely, but a President of the United States? At the very moment that Alice realizes how the world sees her Prince Charming, Charlie suddenly gets his act together - under her threat of divorce. He is born again as a Christian and becomes the front man for a consortium of businessmen who buy the local baseball team. He is elected governor...
...even Noah Webster, father of American lexicography, all lobbied for spelling reform, their reasons ranging from traumatic childhood spelling experiences to the hope that easier communication would promote peace. In 1906, Mark Twain lobbied the Associated Press to use phonetic spelling. "The heart of our trouble is with our foolish alphabet," he once wrote. "It doesn't know how to spell, and can't be taught...
Over the past month, a foolish narrative has been abroad in the land: that this election is going to be a "referendum" on Barack Obama. This is not uncommon in presidential politics--John Kerry's consultants fantasized that the 2004 election was going to be a referendum on George W. Bush--but it is usually peddled by weak campaigns that want to avoid dealing with their own candidate's deficiencies. Presidential elections are never referendums. They are, ultimately, a choice. Two candidates stand on a stage in debate: they talk; you decide...
...moment of real economic peril, a recession different from most because it is happening at a hinge of history, as economic power becomes distributed more evenly around the world. It also is happening at the end of the political pendulum swing that began with Reagan's remarkably foolish statement in his first Inaugural Address: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem...
...have so much time to think about this stuff, so they want to make it easy for you. They translate complex economic projections into aphorisms. They turn tax plans that must be read with lawyers' help into sentences a third-grader can understand. The details? Bah. That's politically foolish, even if voters claim that's what they really want to hear about...