Word: inept
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There are other reasons as well. He is, by all accounts, a moral man. And it is perhaps for this reason that he has proved so inept a politician recently. Only a moral man could tell such halfhearted and graceless lies, or be so club-footed in political maneuvering. By comparison, the professional liars of the Nixon administration seem like politicians of great sophistication and subtlety, which of course, they are not. No administration in recent memory has, for example, so bungled its relations with Congress as the Nixon crew...
...rank as one of the sorriest athletic spectacles in history. True, hundreds of athletes did their human best, breaking dozens of world and Olympic records. Nonetheless, the impact of these extraordinary feats of strength, endurance and grace was marred by the chauvinistic stockpiling of team points, power politics, inept and prejudiced officiating, flagrant commercialism and oleaginous doses of carnival ballyhoo...
...Note. Reporters have compiled a long list of black marks against McGovern: his early waffling on welfare and wealth-distribution, his inept handling of the Eagleton affair, dissension within his own campaign organization, and contradictory statements that called his credibility into question. When McGovern came up with new tax proposals two weeks ago, David Broder noted wryly in the Washington Post that the candidate had "interrupted his devastatingly effective effort to discredit himself as a presidential contender." "McGovern's problem these days," wrote Bob Healy in the Boston Globe, "is that he does not know what he wants...
Even according to the dismal standards established by predecessors like Cool Breeze, Super Fly seems remarkably exploitative and inept. Director Gordon Parks Jr. (his father is the photojournalist turned film maker who directed the two Shaft movies) cuts to a shot of the fancy grillwork on Priest's car whenever he does not know what else to do. Thus there is an abundance of grillwork shots. This is Parks' first feature, and some faults are customary under such circumstances. But Super Fly shows no evidence of perception, intelligence or sensitivity; there is only a kind of frivolous opportunism...
Keneally's narrative has the short, brutal rhythm of the ax, each stroke glinting with images of hallucinatory brilliance (in a flash of revulsion against his aboriginal brethren, Jimmie imagines "a vineyard of gallows from which hung all the inept, unfortunate race, emphatically asleep"). Occasionally, Keneally overheats his language, invoking the pull of blood and the core of blackness in a way that recalls D.H. Lawrence in a rant. But most of the time the novel's intensity arises naturally from the dualities that throb at its center -black and white, crime and punishment, civilization and savagery...