Word: silbering
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...Bellotti and lieutenant governor Evelyn Murphy, the third surviving candidate, will train their guns on Silber, whom they fear for his brains, bile and ability to dominate the news. Says pollster Gerry Chervinsky: "If he gets going on substance, Silber is going to win." He would be a formidable general-election candidate whose stern morality could draw Reagan Democrats back to the party and attract liberal Republicans...
...Silber has come this far by saying whatever is on his mind. He bills himself as the ultimate political outsider at a time when insiders are as popular as cockroaches. The state is in a fiscal mess because of people like Bellotti and Murphy, he argues, and it needs him to slash about $1 billion in fat, reform the education system, create prison schools at abandoned military bases and add 12 cents per gal. to the state gasoline tax to trigger new jobs through business activity and tourism...
...Silber's voice resonates in part because he has no political filter. He moves through life like a heat-seeking missile, careering from one trajectory to another as new targets appear on his screen. He believes in absolutes. He abhors moral relativism and what others call "values." "A person who believes in having sexual relationships with children has values," he snaps in a clipped Texas baritone. "He puts a high value on pedophilia...
Such flipness has resulted in "a 24-hour stakeout on John Silber's mouth," in the words of media analyst Ralph Whitehead. The watch often pays off. Who else calls the Boston School Committee "otiose" or academic opponents "pismires" (derived from a Scandinavian term for urinating ants)? During his campaign, Silber declared that a person can live with alcohol abuse and still achieve at a high level, likened the oratory technique of Jesse Jackson to that of Adolf Hitler and asserted that "the racism of Jews is quite phenomenal." He told reporters early in the campaign, "I know...
...Silber has toned down his rhetoric since then, but he remains as addicted to controversy as a moth is to a porch light. Last month he suggested that funds for teenage welfare mothers who have more than one child be cut off. He enraged the party establishment by comparing the 15% convention threshold to the exclusionary tactics Southern white supremacists used to keep blacks out of politics...