Word: venal
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...Congo, of course, was the 19th-century invention of the venal King Leopold of Belgium, whose epic abuses of human rights in a colony he claimed as his personal property inspired history's first international human rights campaign, as well as Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." It's still there on the map, of course - a territorial behemoth the size of Western Europe, stretching from Sudan in Africa's northeast to Angola and Zambia in its southwest. It has a flag (although its bland blue banner spangled with an assortment of gold stars looks more like the neutral emblem...
...reach. He made Dingell-Norwood sound like some scam rather than the best effort of Congressmen holding competing world views to balance the needs of patients against those of HMOs. It's called legislation, and until the Constitution is amended, it is how things get done. Washington can be venal and small. Viewers of 60 Minutes learned last Sunday that if you want a highway-construction contract, you have to hire a certain lobbyist named Ann Eppard, who happens to be the campaign manager and close personal friend of the congressional concrete king, Representative Bud Shuster. But Washington...
...period in American life, and it is foolish and even delusional to imagine that one could recreate the voter interest generated by a Kennedy-Nixon race at the height of the Cold War in the prosperous and meretricious 1990s, with the lackluster Bob Dole facing off against the charmingly venal Bill Clinton...
...Ironically, one of the TV series Lieberman awarded the Silver Sewer last year, the outstanding Fox Hollywood satire "Action," made Lieberman's case far better than he does, scathingly portraying movie execs as venal, corrupt sleazebags. Like most moralists, of course, the senator was too narrow-minded to look past the fact that the show contained a bunch of dirty words. But one standout episode also contained a blistering rejoinder to Lieberman's kind of moralizing. The show's antihero, movie producer Peter Dragon, defends his sex-and- blood-soaked movies to a sanctimonious senator at a congressional hearing...
Canadians, if they are in a bad mood, consider that their neighbors to the south are a hyperthyroid, overprivileged, overbearing, overstimulated, venal crowd, self-important to the point of narcissism. Who can deny it? To the American's cartooning imagination, on the other hand, the Canadian seems - if you will forgive a circular argument - an awful lot like Al Gore...