Word: hatchet
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
After Bob Dole upset George Bush in the 1988 Iowa caucuses, the Vice President's troops contrived a desperation strategy to provoke Dole to anger. "Make him blow, revive his 'hatchet man' image, make him seem too meanspirited to be President," recalls a top Bush aide who is now advising Dole. "That was the goal, and it worked." Every whiff of scandal, every scurrilous charge, every distortion of the Senator's record was lobbed at Dole with fury. The cumulative effect was decisive. After Bush won the New Hampshire primary, Dole angrily told Bush to "stop lying about my record...
What baseball should do now is go on. Bury the hatchet. And hope that players' great season will recaptivate fan interest...
Hogarthian characters abounded in the theater. There was Abel, the flamboyant homosexual who would hoot at pulchritudinous customers; Norma the manager, who had the face of a hatchet and the demeanor of Torquemada; Katie, poor, sweet, knocked-up Katie; vivacious Gilda, a fortyish woman of Italian extraction who had been raised in Ethiopia and who now devoted herself to the music and careers of heavy metal bands; baby-faced George, an aspiring actor who claimed to have had a meeting with Steven Bochco's people; and Autumn, as delicate a ditz as ever broke a man's heart...
...through his bowl-cut hair, which makes him look like an unruly teenager. He also has a penchant for the goofy. One Budget Committee brainstorming session opened to the strains of Wooly Bully punctuated by a Nerf gunfight between Budget staff members and lobbyists. He will wave a toy hatchet at an interviewer one moment and say earnestly the next: ``I want you to believe this, too, that intellectually what we're talking about is right...
...cameo as ``a stroke that helped people see I wasn't just that Tricky Dick, meanspirited son-of-a-bitch.'' So Dole took a page from the Nixon playbook, and for the same reason. If he feared that he's seen as stiff and sardonic, still perceived as a hatchet man by those who recall his slash-and-burn campaign tactics as Gerald Ford's 1976 vice-presidential running mate, well, then maybe he was right to use network TV's hippest show to lighten his image...