Word: undercutting
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Democratic leaders who had fought the aid request could only sputter their annoyance with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega Saavedra. It was the second time he had undercut a potential victory in Washington: four days after the House had rejected contra funding eleven months ago, he embarked on a well- publicized and ill-timed pilgrimage to Moscow. House Speaker Tip O'Neill, who engineered the most recent defeat of the contra aid package, termed the invasion a "tremendous blunder" and disgustedly called Ortega "a bumbling, incompetent Marxist-Leninist, a Communist." Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont quipped sarcastically that...
...that the Administration renew bilateral talks with the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. At midweek, however, Reagan signed a letter firmly stating, "Conditioning our aid to the Nicaraguan resistance on the initiation of direct bilateral talks, without first requiring that the Sandinistas talk to their own internal opposition, would seriously undercut our friends in the region and our foreign policy worldwide...
Preston Sturges used to write and direct this stuff pretty well, with gusts of anarchic energy and a gaggle of pruny character actors to undercut the sentiment. Frank Capra was a master at building social comedy to the apex of hysteria, then pulling a happy-ending miracle out of his hat. Ron Howard, even after Splash and Cocoon, ain't these guys, yet. When he lets his film relax into hip facetiousness, and when Keaton parades his elfin jock swagger, Gung Ho is agreeable. But its relentless stereotyping of the Japanese provokes winces and worse. Its tone swings violently from...
...commissioning an extensive study by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communications and the Gallup organization. The three conclusions: surprisingly, although the evangelists raise their funds to reach the "lost," they mostly reinforce people already committed to evangelical religion. Contrary to understandable fears, Gospel TV does not undercut attendance and contributions at local churches. The competing church factions face a common, all-powerful enemy: secularized general...
...grand strategies of superpower diplomacy were undercut last week by individual lunges for freedom. In Afghanistan, troops of the Soviet-backed Communist government surrounded the U.S. embassy in Kabul after a 19-year-old Soviet soldier slipped in through an open gate. Embassy personnel were allowed to come and go, but electricity to the building was cut off while U.S. diplomats tried to determine whether the soldier was seeking political asylum. Said Secretary of State George Shultz, en route to Moscow for presummit consultations: "Our posture is to do our best to look after his interests...