Word: pious
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...millions of committed Christians, the late '80s brought agonizing disillusionment. One after another, some of the country's most prominent Protestant televangelists revealed themselves as pious pretenders, driven by lust or avarice or unsaintly ego. Perhaps most distressing was the ammunition the scandals gave to the skeptical and scornful. While erstwhile believers in Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart and Marvin Gorman winced at the exposes of dalliance and the unconvincing protestations of repentance, countless other Americans were laughing...
...school of thought holds that for this reason the best route to reform is based on the dictatorship model of Chile and Singapore: bring capitalism, and hope democracy will follow. But most skeptics about aid to the Soviet Union want democracy simultaneously or even as a precondition. The pious hope that democracy can ease and legitimate sacrifice for the national good is not exactly vindicated by current American experience...
Asked last week about the nuclear-reactor project, a Foreign Ministry official in Beijing said, "We have never heard of that," and promptly changed the subject. Even in public, Chinese leaders make little pretense of being serious about controlling missiles and conventional armaments. They repeat pious slogans about eliminating nuclear weapons but otherwise imply that they will do what they wish with their "prudent and responsible" arms sales...
Every artist needs some source of inspiration. Max Ernst, the lyric German subversive who was born 100 years ago, had one that carried him through most of his life. He hated his father, a pious Catholic art teacher who worked in a school for deaf and mute children in a small forest town south of Cologne. Indeed, Ernst wanted to kill Papa and what he thought he represented: the authority of age, religion, the state and the image...
...could have justified rejecting the first without forgoing the second. His unconscionable silence reflected a recurring problem of his foreign policy. The White House apparently believes the public will not understand decisions taken for hard- boiled reasons of national interest; it thinks those reasons must be given a pious cloak. The U.S. launched the gulf war in part to safeguard oil supplies, in part to protect allies and punish a naked act of aggression -- all of which should have been moral enough. But Bush in addition preached a crusade against a demonized butcher of Baghdad, as if Washington would settle...