Word: scoundrel
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...overtaken by circumstance. Yet his call for a corrective to the country's present antiheroic mood is simply an "intelligent political participation on the part of citizens"-a phrase indistinguishable from November editorials in small-town newspapers. His attack on Lillian Hellman, whom he calls "The Scoundrel in the Looking Glass," exhumes old records to catch the autobiographer in a variety of duplicities and concealments. Hook concludes that "the manner in which [she] refers to ... anti-Communist liberals shows that what she cannot forgive them for is not so much their alleged failure to criticize [Joseph] McCarthy but ... their...
Patriotism has often had a terrible reputation. Samuel Johnson called it "the last refuge of a scoundrel." Tolstoy thundered: "There never has been a combined act of violence by one set of people upon another set of people that has not been perpetrated in the name of patriotism." Patriotism is both indispensable and extremely dangerous, involving always the hazards of the self being ceded to the larger purposes of the fatherland. Hitler had a sinister little instinct for patriotic sentiment. Patriotism, or a debased form of it, raucous with jingo and the bully's knuckles...
PODHORETZ DROPS NAMES, and not always affectionately. He hates the politically nerveless and the overly cynical, but lands heaviest on the intellectual hypocrites, attacking, for example, Lillian Hellman, whose book Scoundrel Time defended Stalin and his crimes, while disgracefully comparing the plight of Eastern European dissidents to the bogus martyrdom of those who, under congressional questioning, evasively pleaded the fifth...
...Thomas Carlyle was an exception; he instructed his own biographer, James Anthony Froude, to put down the truth about him. But when he died and Froude did just that, telling how sour, self-centered and occasionally violent the great man really was, half of England denounced Froude as a scoundrel and a traitor. Biographies were popular in both Britain and America throughout the 19th century, but few modern readers could or would endure them. Speeches and letters were quoted at enormous length-a life of Lincoln ran to ten volumes. Authors were expected to remain discreetly behind the curtains, without...
...Please, no more letters to honor that scoundrel and rogue who frequently exhorted Boston voters to 'Vote early and often,' " replied Jean Rogers, languishing in Provincetown. Curley was no "scoundrel and rogue," sniped George Morrissey from Newton. And furthermore, "The true exhortation was 'Vote often and early for James Michael Curley...