Word: moral
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...seemed that we spent the year in the moral faculty lounge debating the weight of our principles, there was value in that exercise as well. You learn more about the views you hold when you're forced to defend them. Tom DeLay tried to frame the debate as a choice between relativism and absolute truths, but there were subtler arguments advanced by both sides. Smart virtuecrats like Bill Bennett argued that a leader who occasionally drank in the evenings was not impeachable, but one who drank before deciding on troop deployments maybe was. White House officials agonized in private over...
That absence of outrage appalled many conservatives, who took it as evidence of widespread moral laziness among people too drunk on Internet stocks and cheap gasoline to care about their soul. But that diagnosis also invited a closer look. We call ourselves God's country, always scooping up lost religious rebels into a nation safe for people with strong moral views. This year revealed how strong and how varied those views turn out to be. Clinton has privately called the Congress that dared pursue him "Stalinist"; James Dobson, meanwhile, has said the American people can no longer recognize the nature...
Some have argued that because Clinton has survived with so few Americans approving of his character and so many approving of his performance, it shows that it is possible to govern without moral authority. The logical response is to question not whether Clinton has moral authority but whether he has governed. Over the past six years there have been triumphs he can legitimately claim--his partnership with Congress on welfare reform, balancing the budget, raising the minimum wage, promoting peace in Ireland and elsewhere. But this year, when his moral authority was systematically stripped, we could not help being aware...
...Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, "The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses." I submit that our Congress needs to reach higher to have a beneficial influence on our society and that it has so far been paralyzed by ignoble impulses. COREY BRUNISH Lake Oswego...
...whole party into the muck. And amazingly, Democrats are buying into the Big Creep's definition of victory: three-quarters of the country believe he is untrustworthy and lacking ethical standards, and they're popping corks. Party leaders are united in defense of this man--their guiding principles of moral and legal relativity have been elevated to an art form (one standard for liberal Presidents, another for everyone else). The politics of personal destruction that they invented (with attacks on Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, et al.) has, on Clinton's behalf, been perfected by pornographers and private eyes...