Word: ineptness
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Know-it-alls come in two types: "real experts," who are right about 75% of the time, and "phony experts," who are inept and usually wrong. The real experts are highly valuable, but dogmatic, stubborn and often "so superior in tone that they make others feel useless." Co-workers who must face a know-it-all should do their homework carefully, and instead of arguing, ask "extensional" questions, such as "How will this approach work with our five lands of customers?" The questions may lead know-it-alls to see their errors because they are among the few troublemakers...
...draft-Teddy boom, a Boston Globe poll showed Kennedy leading Carter in New Hampshire by better than 2 to 1. But when the Senator became an announced candidate, he plummeted in New Hampshire as elsewhere in the country. Voters questioned his stands on issues, wondered over his inept campaigning and brought up old doubts about Chappaquiddick. On the weekend before primary day, Kennedy threw everything and everyone into the campaign, including 1,500 volunteers who rang countless doorbells and phones to summon supporters to the polls. He managed only to narrow the margin to 11%, enough for him to keep...
...embassy in Saigon in the frantic hours before the city's fall on April 30, 1975. Snepp, then 31 and a senior analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, with 4½ years experience in Viet Nam, thought the agency's withdrawal planning had been shockingly inept, particularly in that hundreds of local CIA collaborators were simply left behind to meet whatever fate awaited them. After he returned to Washington, where he was awarded the agency's Medal of Merit, he quit to write Decent Interval, a critical account of the CIA's performance during South Viet...
Bias certainly doesn't explain the hectoring tone in the press when a candidate doesn't perform up to his potential. It's more like a fight promoter's attempt to ensure a well-balanced card. Thus David S. Broder, contrasting Howard Baker's inept campaign in Maine with "the Howard Baker that Washington knows," concludes censoriously: "The man on the stump in this presidential campaign is a double who invites ridicule." James Reston reproves the voters themselves because John Anderson of Illinois, "a good man in a bad time," doesn't fare better...
...famous of the grotesque games come from the fevered imagination of Chuck Barris. Beginning with The Dating Game (1965) and continuing through The Newlywed Game, The Gong Show and The $1.98 Beauty Contest, he has made a habit of finding contestants who willingly expose their sad sexual inadequacies, their inept performing skills and their physical homeliness to a nationwide audience. In Barris' latest and grossest gem, Three's a Crowd (which might well be titled The Divorce Game), wives and secretaries compete to see who knows the most intimate details about the man whom they share. The trouble...