Word: petard
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...Ignatiev's still highly readable study is the new scholarly petard that hoists any lingering myths of white tolerance in antebellum New England. Equally exciting are Ignatiev's observations on 'race' penned as his Afterword viable for another book altogether. 'Race', he notes, not only holds no scientific or biological validity, but continuously devalues itself as a meaningful expression by amalgamating everything from supremacist theory to personal preference. Europe's ethnic divisions, which might have diverted attention from color conflicts, instead disolved into America's melting pot, and left us with the great divide...
...personally in favor of the establishment of a ROTC program at Harvard. It would be fun to watch liberals here being hoisted on their own petard. But I am horrified that the national government has so much influence over Harvard. Liberals ought to be made to draw the proper lesson from this affair: that centralized power is always a threat to liberty...
...famous but never smiling F.O.Matthiessen, the first senior tutor of EliotHouse, lectured on Shakespeare, annoyed that wedidn't know the meaning of "petard." Once, as Ipassed him on a path, he amazed me with a warm andfriendly smile. Two days later, he jumped from thewindow of Boston's Hotel Touraine to his death...
...years of Reagan gave this liberal more joy than watching the president's second Supreme Court nominee--selected precisely because of his lack of a substantive past--vanish in a puff of smoke. I relished every minute as the president hoisted himself on his own anti-drug, anti-crime petard. Thanks to Reagan's demagoguery, another bitter Senate confrontation battle was avoided...
...unpleasant orders as emanating from an implacable superior; it was a tactic I used in my relationship to Nixon. Nor had I strenuously objected when others had put me in the position of the good guy in the White House. In that sense Haig hoisted me with my own petard...