Word: sordidly
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...wish to remember what the Senator from Wisconsin and his pals actually did to academe in the '50s: the firings of tenured profs in mid- career, the inquisitions by the House Committee on Un-American Activities on the content of libraries and courses, the campus loyalty oaths, the whole sordid atmosphere of persecution, betrayal and paranoia. The number of conservative academics fired by the lefty thought police, by contrast, is zero. There has been heckling. There have been baseless accusations of racism. And certainly there is no shortage of the zealots, authoritarians and scramblers who view PC as a shrewd...
...Vietnam; instead, they stood by the hopelessly corrupt and unpopular regime of Ngo Dinh Diem and complained about getting bad press. (Interestingly, the Administration toyed at one point with the idea of getting rid of Diem's vicious and powerful brother, one of the more sordid features of a generally sor-did South Vietnamese government, by sending him off to teach at Harvard...
...course, an accumulation of sordid revelations has made J.F.K.'s Washington seem less like Arthur's Camelot than Capone's Chicago. J.F.K. himself, we know, was almost literally in bed with the Chicago Mob, sleeping with the godfather's mistress, for God's sake; his minions used Chicago mobsters as hit men against a rival head of state. He was enmeshed in sordid blackmail intrigues with Hoover; he was implicated in bugging King's bedrooms. Far from a noble peacemaker, he was a hawkish enthusiast for dirty tricks and covert ops, so Machiavellian that -- according to Michael Beschloss...
...should have expected that the first court case to claim a huge television audience would center on municipal-bond trading. With a famous name linked to a sordid crime, the rape trial of William Kennedy Smith fits neatly into the usual daytime schedule of leering soap operas. For the same reason, it has turned out to be a test of whether TV cameras will turn the law into a brand of vaudeville. In a case full of senatorial bar hopping and a parlor game called Vegetable, it's already difficult to keep in sight the serious charges -- rape and battery...
...else but the trial at hand. The situation is tempting, for what writer or critic would refuse a chance to look at this trial? It's juicy, sexy, colorful and demanded by the public. The same principles apply to other "faddish" events which mix hard news with sensational and sordid events--like the Clarence Thomas hearings, the Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker scandals and the recent David Duke gubernatorial campaign...