Word: sideshow
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Just when Mikhail Gorbachev had soundly defeated hard-line rival Yegor Ligachev and secured his control over the divided Communist Party, Yeltsin threw down an even greater challenge. He quit the party, threatening to wrest the embattled reform movement from Gorbachev's hands and turn the party into a sideshow...
...cleanup bill mounts, political mudslinging is likely to increase. "The Government needs a sideshow to shift focus from the cost of dealing with the problem," says Paul Horvitz, a finance professor at the University of Houston. At this point, the biggest new scandal would be to push the increased bailout cost into the future by borrowing more money. Felix Rohatyn, the Manhattan investment banker and fiscal gadfly, proposed last week that the Government pay for the bailout with a 5% surcharge on federal income taxes, which could raise $25 billion to $35 billion a year. Borrowing the money instead...
...from a number of preachers in the black churches she often visits. Concludes state assembly speaker Willie Brown, who has known her for 30 years: "Dianne is as good a communicator as Ronald Reagan -- without the Chamber of Commerce jokes." To Feinstein, in fact, public performance is not a sideshow but something that cuts close to the heart of politics. "Ninety percent of leadership is the ability to communicate something that people want...
During the Reagan years, it seemed as if the American and Soviet First Ladies had decided to continue the superpower rivalry by other means. Raisa Gorbachev and Nancy Reagan's every tea, luncheon and photo op was another skirmish in their mutual assured destruction pact, a frost-filled sideshow of haute-to- haute combat. Reagan complained that Gorbachev lectured her mercilessly on Marx and missiles, compared the White House to a museum, and was given to an imperious snapping of her fingers to summon the KGB to fetch a chair for her. After one White House dinner where Raisa used...
Then there are the Lynchian touches of off-kilter characters and sideshow weirdness. A woman with an eyepatch has an obsession with drapes. Visitors to a bank vault find a stuffed deer head lying on the table. "It fell down," notes a bank officer blandly. The boyish FBI agent (Kyle MacLachlan) dictates every detail of his day into a cassette recorder and gets misty-eyed over Douglas firs and snowshoe rabbits. "Know why I'm whittling?" he says to the sheriff at one point. "Because that's what you do in a town where a yellow light still means slow...