Word: pompousity
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...sometimes he forgot who he had become. Under pressure he reverted to the pompous thug of late-night cable, the backbencher lobbing grenades on C-SPAN about sick Democrats who were enemies of normal Americans. He was new on the job. And the job, as he reshaped it, was new too. He didn't realize his every remark would now be measured for maturity, not ferocity. He didn't realize that once a battle is won, it's time to move graciously to the peace table. "I keep forgetting that all the ground rules have changed,'' he told Time last...
...Character Issue: Pierce Brosnan is not as gravely witty as Sean Connery, not as insouciant as Roger Moore and not a pompous twit like Timothy Dalton. He's a mid-range James Bond, on whom a certain self-consciousness has been imposed. He continues to register emotions mainly by arching or furrowing an eyebrow. But in the age of sexual correctness they have cut back his double entendres, and people keep telling him he lacks the capacity for mature relationships with women. Worse, he seems to believe them. What next? Sensitivity training? A condom in his wallet? Teetotaling, with perhaps...
...times I've watched in near embarrassment as she chastises him"--for believing his p.r., for getting windy or phony during a speech, for allowing Larry King to stroke him like a cat. "She gets ticked off," says Michael. "She'll say, 'My, that man of mine can be pompous,' and she'll let him know: 'That was stupid. You looked stupid.' He loves that about her. She helps him hold on to himself...
...says about the forces that shaped his character and thinking: his parents, his early attraction to a military career, his brushes with racism in the South, his two tours of duty in Vietnam. Powell, who wrote the book with historian- biographer Joseph E. Persico, retains a serious but not pompous tone, with frequent flashes of self-deprecating wit. A man fond of maxims, Powell is always looking to learn from mistakes as well as successes, and he frames much of his story that way. Under the glass top of his desk at the Pentagon, Powell kept a pulpit's worth...
...race also gives Powell license to recognize and even joke about the ethnic differences in America in the face of both tiresome political correctness and simmering racial hatred. In his San Diego speech he parodied a pompous white military officer speaking in empty and orotund phrases. Then he mimicked a black sergeant talking about the coming war in the Persian Gulf: "We gonna kick butt and go home." Describing an encounter with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at his White House treaty signing with Yasser Arafat, Powell put on a New York Jewish accent. And he even worked around...