Word: wisdoms
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...Helms was not above working with apparent enemies, and he was open to a light touch. Madeleine Albright famously convinced him of the wisdom of paying America's U.N. arrears and of supporting the Chemical Weapons Convention. And Bono managed to help change his mind about aid to Africa. Helms remained vigorously protectionist to the end, however, and protected North Carolina's tobacco interests throughout his career with equal vigor. But with more than a few lone dissenting votes in the Senate over 30 years, including his opposition to popular nominations and education bills, he'll be remembered mainly...
...much more. Twain's mystery novel Pudd'nhead Wilson--aside from being one of the earliest stories to hinge on the evidence of fingerprints--stood as a challenge to the racial convictions of even many of the liberals of his day. Written at a time when the accepted wisdom held Negroes to be inferior to whites, especially in intellect, Twain's tale revolved in part around two babies switched at birth. A slave gave birth to her master's baby and, concerned lest the child be sold South, switched him in the crib for the master's baby...
...Twain a racist? Asking the question in the 21st century is as sensible as asking the same of Lincoln. If we read the words and attitudes of the past through the pompous "wisdom" of the considered moral judgments of the present, we will find nothing but error. Lincoln, who believed the black man the inferior of the white, prosecuted and won a war to free him nevertheless. And Twain, raised in a slave state, briefly a member of a Confederate militia, and inventor of Jim, may have done more to rile the nation over racial injustice and rouse its collective...
...remedy, Twain proposed, tongue in cheek, that sheriffs might be dispatched to communities where a lynching was about to take place. If they could rally enough citizens to oppose the hideous deed, that would make the anti-lynching position the new conventional wisdom that everyone would flock to conform to. But a problem--where to find enough sheriffs? Why not draft them from among the Christian missionaries spreading the malady of Western civilization in China? (Missionaries were a favorite target for Twain.) In China, he told his readers, "almost every convert runs a risk of catching our civilization ... We ought...
...foreign policy record. Why? Because the first is unassailable, while the other is eminently flawed, says Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. McCain's war record "simply shows he was a very brave man. But it shows neither wisdom nor judgment," says Carpenter. "And when it comes to foreign affairs, it's irrelevant...