Word: scapegoat
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Some sympathetic White House aides say that Allen, who reports to the President mainly through Counsellor Edwin Meese, is now being unfairly cast as a scapegoat. Most insiders, however, feel that he has managed to make a difficult situation worse by his inept efforts on the Hill. "He had neither the clout nor the brains to pull it off," said one Senate aide...
...diagnosis went beyond both: the client, he concluded, had a father fixation. He had expanded the company in order to prove that he was a bigger and better executive than Dad, and then, when business faltered, he appointed a successor in an unconscious desire to find a scapegoat...
...they launched a torrent of abuse and terror to relieve their overloaded its. This is no psychobabble. As Bernard Bailyn has pointed out in his sympathetic portrait of Hutchinson, the patriots' anger toward the royal governor surpassed all bounds of fairness, or even common sense. Hutchinson was a scapegoat, blamed for more crimes than even he could have committed, by a populace that had labeled him a villain and could not be convinced otherwise--even by the truth...
...making Hutchinson the scapegoat and identifying him as a parricide, the patriots transferred to him the most frightening implication of their political resistance. As a result, they were able to regard themselves as continuingly loyal to the king, even as their readiness for separation matured...
Presidential styles are always a matter of elaborate psychological discretion and democratic fine tuning. A President cannot in any important way violate the values of his people or the spirit of his time; not with impunity, anyway. A President, being standin, scapegoat and exemplar, works even closer to the Zeitgeist than Phil Donahue. Before the sumptuous Reagan Inaugural, Barry Goldwater objected: "When you've got to pay $2,000 for a limousine (four-day rental required at $500 per), $7 to park and $2.50 to check your coat, at a time when most Americans can't hack...