Word: gooder
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...stiff and prudish and homely and a do-gooder. She signed innumerable petitions and promoted countless social causes without questioning their country of origin or their ultimate goal. But she could also be brainy, fearless and tough, and just hammy enough at times to take the curse off her indomitable goodness. After all, when impressionists mimicked Eleanor Roosevelt's buck-toothed smile, they were also repeating her messages on tolerance and humanity...
...impregnated with feeling by oversimplification. People who oppose all abortions distort the position of those favoring freedom of private choice by calling them proabortion. And many a progressive or idealist has experienced the perplexity of defending himself against one of the most peculiar of all disparaging terms, do-gooder. By usage in special contexts, the most improbable words can be infused with extraneous meaning. To speak of the "truly needy" as the Administration habitually does is gradually to plant the notion that the unmodified needy are falsely so. Movie Critic Vincent Canby has noticed that the 'word film...
...charismatic, and most of all, ambitious. He has not hesitated to use the politics of publicity (usually from staged media events) to further the Angels' (and therefore his own) cause. A publicly elected or appointed official should be in charge of citizen police forces, not a self-proclaimed do-gooder. Public altruism is the foot-in-the-door to the power monger...
Your article about my confirmation hearings, "Requiem for a 'Do-Gooder' " [June 15], touches briefly on the real issue, which was ideological. You then drop the subject and pick up the gossip. The point in question was President Carter's use of a rubber yardstick, which emphasized the human rights abuses by our friends more than the abuses by our adversaries...
From the beginning Lefever was clearly the wrong choice for the job. A self-professed "do-gooder" who has worked for various liberal and humanitarian causes over the years, he became a convert to conservatism and founded his own rightist think tank, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, in 1976. He advocates making a distinction between "authoritarian" governments of the right (for example, South Africa, South Korea, Chile), which repress dissent, and putatively worse "totalitarian" governments of the left (notably the Soviet Union), which deny both political and economic freedom. Lefever had written that human rights questions should not interfere...