Word: undercutting
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...Humphrey endured some of the worst heckling of the entire campaign. Fists clenched, lips tight, he flew to Utah to deliver a speech pledging that if he became President, he would risk halting the bombing of North Viet Nam in the hope of achieving peace. Twice before, Johnson had undercut him when he tried to stake out even moderately independent positions on the war. This time there was not a word from the White House...
...title Light is supposed to symbolize seven different roles that light can play in a photograph. Each of these roles is described in notes that appear in the catalogue of the show. But don't bother reading the notes; they merely undercut the photographs. Go and see the photographs. They speak articulately for themselves...
...however, was a seamier accommodation with slavery. The Southern states had already forced a provision into the Constitution that permitted three-fifths of their slaves to be tallied in determining their seats in the House of Representatives-even though the slaves could not vote. Direct presidential election would have undercut that advantage. The Electoral College allowed the South to swing the numerical weight of its slaves without granting them suffrage. "In politics," writes Constitutional Historian John Roche, "there are no immaculate conceptions. The Electoral College was merely a jerry-rigged improvisation which has subsequently been endowed with a high theoretical...
...granted as an irreversible reaction to the harsh rigidities of the Stalinist past. The softening of Communism ("They are getting more like us, and we are getting more like them") had become one of the dubiously hopeful cliches of the day. In one brutal night's work, Moscow undercut, if it did not erase, all such assumptions. For all the changes, the Soviet Union still could not bear the contagion of freedom from Czechoslovakia spreading into other Eastern European countries and into Russia itself (see THE WORLD...
Perhaps nothing is more poignant in Africa today than the mental and spiritual effects of detribalization, a process that began when white missionaries undercut the tribal status system by proselytizing its lowliest members, such as women, children and assorted outcasts. As elders lost prestige, the young flocked to cities; severed from tribal morals yet longing for them, some sank into alcoholism, prostitution and petty crime in order to attain Western luxuries. Most were victims of "alienation"?also a Western luxury of sorts...