Word: smokescreening
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This just in: The Lieberman announcement is a smokescreen - a Democratic strategy to add zip to its convention at Los Angeles' Staples Center arena. This week on the floor, just when the delegates and the dozen or so TV viewers least expect it, Joseph Lieberman will surprise everyone by introducing Al Gore's real running mate and Malibu's best-kept secret: Elvis Presley, alive and well and surprisingly trim due to daily tennis matches with his neighbor, Johnny Carson...
McKean calls the committee's reasoning "a smokescreen...
...This is a smokescreen because they don't like teacher testing. These are the same people who would say, 'Well, we're going to pass Johnny to the fourth grade because we don't want to give him a failing grade because it might affect his self-esteem.' So then you put Johnny in the fourth grade and promote him to the fifth grade, and then he gets socially promoted to the teacher college. And then when he gets his teaching degree, he can't pass a literacy test. I don't go along with that. That...
...much sometimes like to think of themselves as complicated. "The most complicated subject that I know, since I am a man," wrote Ernest Hemingway, "is a man's life"--meaning that the most complicated subject he knew was himself. Complexity is a sort of macho/metaphysical burden. But maybe the smokescreen of the "complicated" is also the beginning of the storyteller's art. ("Bill! Bill Faulkner, where have you been for the last three days?" "It's a complicated story, dear...
...justify not drinking on grounds of hypocrisy, given that I believed (and still do believe) that 21 is the proper drinking age--it encourages us to think twice before drinking at a young age and, studies show, it cuts drunk driving deaths. But hypocrisy began to seem like a smokescreen, given my propensity to jay-walk and speed without hesitation...