Word: ruthlessness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...finally, will I miss the hangers-on and toadies who filled the Clinton White House, and who increasingly came to resemble a dysfunctional mob family--the Corleones or the Sopranos, by way of Little Rock and the Democratic Leadership Council. There were the thugs and the buttonmen--the ruthless James Carville, the self-righteous Paul Begala and the detestable ex-journalist Sid Blumenthal--all of whom treated politics as war and were ready to "go to the mattresses" at the drop of a subpoena. Adieu, gentlemen! And adieu, as well, to Vernon Jordan, the dapper consigliere; Albright and Reno, female...
...worth following Nixon farther down the line - worth watching the development of what became the mindset behind Watergate. For it is exactly the same attitude that I notice in the back rooms of Al Gore's mind - the mentality that in this game you have to be tough and ruthless, and win at any cost. Screw them before they screw you. Disillusioned idealism becomes a gangster...
Baby boomers from the antiwar neighborhoods are especially susceptible to this ruthless amorality. Convinced long since of their unassailable idealism and virtue - Didn't they end the war in Vietnam? Didn't they win the battles for civil rights and women's rights? - they are ignorant of their own capacity for evil. The thought would not occur to them. It is an impossibility. They, evil? Ironically, theirs is much the same dangerous innocence for which the prophetic novelist Graham Greene ("The Quiet American") arraigned Americans in Indochina in the mid-1950s, well before they had entered into their fiasco there...
...Lankan Prime Minister 40 years ago, served two more separate terms during her turbulent and somewhat patchy political career, resigning from her last post in August. She may have been the first national leader to address the world as "a woman and a mother," but she could be ruthless: her hamhanded suppression of a Marxist insurrection in 1971 resulted in 20,000 casualties. Bandaranaike had a heart attack in a car on her way home from voting in the elections won by the party led by her daughter, President Chandrika Kumaratunga...
...congressional passage of a bill to normalize trade relations with China, while Gore remained reticent to avoid alienating his labor and environmentalist supporters. Yet Bush and his advisers also denounce the administration for pursuing a "strategic partnership" with Beijing and for being too friendly with a corrupt and ruthless Russian government. Gore says he would negotiate with Moscow on changes to the Antiballistic Missile Treaty to allow the U.S. to build a limited missile-defense system; Bush says he is willing to scrap the ABM treaty, rapidly develop a missile shield and make unilateral arms reductions...