Word: venal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...problem. Fans got two games for the price of one the following night. This week life in the minor leagues is all that baseball fans in serious need of a fix are going to get. Venal owners and petulant players in the majors should take note. This is baseball the way the game is meant to be played: on intimate terms. It is baseball virtually free of mortifying drug scandals -- no player making $1,000 a month can afford a cocaine habit for long. It is baseball on a human scale. When Peoria Chiefs designated hitter Alex Cabrera was fined...
...advantage was cancer. On his deathbed, unable to ply his wiles, he was superseded at Time Warner by Gerald Levin. Superseded but not replaced. Ross was the inimitable master of the art of seduction. From Spielberg to the Time Inc. board, he convinced others that he wasn't a venal capitalist -- he was really George Bailey...
Morality is the ostensible subject of Blue Chips, from a script Shelton wrote in 1980. A college coach (Nick Nolte) fights for traditional values against venal alumni who want to buy the best players. But the film avoids the hard truth that even traditional values in big-time college sports are a shuck. Education is just the fig leaf for the only multibillion-dollar entertainment conglomerate in which the entertainers (the players) don't get paid. The Nolte character, like any college coach, is the overseer of slave labor...
...this is a presidency that makes a public fetish of its virtuousness. The Clintons really do believe that they are doing God's work on health care, welfare, national service, etc., and that those who oppose them do so for the most venal, usually pecuniary, motives. They really do believe theirs is the politics of virtue. Hillary Clinton spent so much time championing the politics of virtue that she earned a cover photograph in the New York Times Magazine last year showing her dressed in purest white, with the accompanying article headlined SAINT HILLARY...
...defense fund and many other groups would jump at the chance of a precedent-setting suit? Why is Andy's huge family so conspicuously loving, so unanimously supportive? Why do the good guys have to be so pristine and the bad guys -- senior law partners, of course -- so ostentatiously venal? Andy's last joke is one that all viewers are expected to applaud: "What do you call a thousand lawyers chained together at the bottom of the ocean? A good start...