Word: sordid
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...restore some balance to American politics?-is at the heart of the 2006 congressional election. The most likely answer is that the moderate wing of the Republican Party, especially in New England, will have to be eviscerated. This election may provide a historic completion to the sordid business of ideological realignment that began with the decimation of the Democratic Party in the South. The stability provided by two regionally diverse parties with flourishing moderate wings has been supplanted by clashing Northern liberal and Southern conservative parties, a system in which, ironically, the surest path to political balance is a divided...
...These sordid confrontations with reality are exotic to Harvard students, the kind of thing that they don’t know and only rarely imagine,” muses Slavitt, a Yale graduate. “Much of the purpose of going to places like Harvard and Yale is to obviate the need for such vulgar encounters...
...building, my decision to pursue the story hinged less on its interest to The Crimson’s audience than on my qualms about the newspaper “making,” rather then reporting, the news. Clearly, the story was of a kind of sordid interest to a substantial part of campus. But the newspaper appeared to walk a difficult line in equating interest with newsworthiness. If we decided objectively that this story appealed to our readers, we would in effect be originating the news by publicizing these private e-mail archives to a far greater audience...
...roguish quality of these exploits dovetails nicely with Americans' rather sordid assumptions about whom they send to the Capitol. Polls have found that most Americans believe both senators and congressmen to be "petty politicians fighting for personal gain," (63%) "out of touch with what's going on in the country," (63%) and 41% believe that their own Congressman has taken a bribe. Of course, they are still electing them - perhaps as a way of rewarding their sheer stick-to-it-iveness and initiative. Being this corrupt, after all, must be hard work. Between the tabloid stories and the presumption...
...spurious lessons—lessons not in the sense that they are morals to live by, but in the sense that they gesture toward the University’s sacred cows, to which a president must pay unabated homage if he hopes to achieve anything.The central lesson of this sordid story is that Harvard is a place of its own—a tender, delicate place where perceived offenses are clamored upon with professorial cattiness. It is not the efficient outside world, where open, honest talk is not only encouraged, but is essential because the greatest danger is that something...