Word: smug
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...pillaging the American economy and environment. But the Democratic rhetoric sometimes fell oddly on the ear. For all the talk of compassion, there was in the Democrats' words and attitudes an insistently selfish sense of entitlement. If, in the Democratic version, the Reagan Republican is a sleek, smug, oblivious Darwinian, the Democrats left themselves open to being regarded as a collection of tribes endlessly brawling over things for themselves. Even the feminists demanding the nomination of a woman vice-presidential candidate acted for reasons that were selfish - as well as perfectly valid and historically necessary...
Somewhere along the way, Vidal seems to have grown weary of his lonely stand against the barbarians. The more he castigated them, the more they praised and purchased his witty and iconoclastic novels. Myra Breckinridge (1968) was supposed to be a poke in the eye to smug notions of sexual identity; it became a bestseller instead. Julian (1964) and Burr (1973) insisted that true heroes of history are villains in the dull popular imagination; millions of people, including dullards, relished this insight. By this time, success dogged Vidal at every turn. If you cannot offend your enemies, why not take...
Your writer is the touchiest of all. His smug world of preppie crudities has been challenged, and he is annoyed that its victims are no longer "good sports." Nobody likes to be put down...
Others are not so sure, "I would not be so glib as to think it couldn't happen again," says Epps. 'That was our problem in 1969--we were too smug, not adequately prepared. We thought we were different from Columbia and Berkeley."NATHAN M. PUSEY...
...case whose outcome seemed to justify Mr. Bumble's judgment that "the law is a ass." A man who jumped in front of a subway train in an attempt to kill himself sued the local transit authority-and won a $650,000 settlement. Only in New York, a smug outlander might be tempted to say. In theory, though, it could have occurred in most states, a dumbfounding example of how a needed legal reform can be pushed to the edge of irrationality...