Word: taint
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EVEN allowing for the partisan scandalmongering in which all candidates traffic, the nation's political air seems especially contaminated this year -thick with the taint of special favors, dirty money, interparty espionage, intimations of official power in the service of corporate friends. Nothing has yet been proved exactly, but the cloud hangs over Washington like an inversion. When Martha Mitchell fled to New York, taking her husband with her, she spoke a bit Delphicly about "all those dirty things that go on." Democratic polemicists suggest that the capital was not nearly so dirty until John Mitchell and Richard Nixon...
Even the convention "scoop" by David Schoumacher of CBS had a spurious taint about it. During the evening he stood at a closed door inside the hall. The President's big policymakers were in there, he announced, "hammering out the final details on the rules fight." Out of mike shot, he said he thought the story "passed for news under non-news conditions. I wanted to open the door on camera, but I didn't have the nerve. What if I found five janitors playing cards in there...
...banning the maintenance of a premises for use of marijuana applies only to a building that the owners specifically maintain for criminal purposes, said Judge James Gibson for the 5-to-2 majority. "It was never'contemplated that the criminal taint would attach to a family home should members of the family on one occasion smoke marijuana or hashish there...
What might trouble the Republican serenity? First, there is a credibility gap, an atmosphere of taint that reminds some observers of the last years of the Truman Administration. The cloud of ITT is in the air. So is the Republican refusal to disclose the names of those who poured $10 million, quite legally, into the G.O.P. war chest. The bugging raid on the Democratic National Committee headquarters fosters a nagging suspicion...
...Newcastle. Daniel Defoe was once put in the stocks in 18th century London for writing a treatise against the political power of the church. He promptly penned a poem about the experience and had it hawked in the very street where he was taking his punishment. A similar entrepreneurial taint clouds Alvarez's effort. He makes a fine brisk guide to changing historic attitudes toward suicide: Roman Stoics practiced it gladly; romantic poets preached it madly; the early Christians pursued de facto suicide by avidly seeking martyrdom, until in A.D. 412 Saint Augustine declared the act a mortal...