Word: schoolmarms
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...been stingy; the U.S. says the Russians have been "brazen and blatant," but "we've thwarted" them. The tension broke last week in Moscow with the arrest of Cheri Leberknight, 33, ostensibly a U.S. embassy official but actually a CIA spy, according to the Russians. More schoolmarm than Mata Hari in looks, she was snatched late Monday with "ink tablets for secret correspondence" and equipment for detecting surveillance, says Moscow...
...after the melodrama, after the white devil disappears offstage, snarling like Cagney, a scruple (call it A.C.L.U. logic, a schoolmarm in the mind) begins to wave its little hand in the back of the hall. Easy cases make bad law, or bad principle. The powerful emotional sway of this one is unsettling...
Most career civil servants like Tripp, especially those trusted enough to work in the White House, are ferociously competent and unrelentingly discreet. They often stay for decades, and they keep their mouth shut. Tripp was different. She was seen as a schoolmarm, a bit obsessed with improprieties she saw around her. She once turned in an Army reservist for "petty wrongdoing," according to the Washington Post, and consequently got the man fired...
...blame liberals for this at first: something about the term facilitator makes you think of liberals and their schoolmarm view of the world ("No running, please, no pushing, no bad talk") that leads them to eliminate sharp edges and outlaw flirtation between strangers and rearrange the playing field so that the sidelines are the goals. Liberals are in charge of the schools, and they rewrite the tests to keep the scores from dropping. Liberals run the churches, and nobody talks about sin lest it tend to make folks feel marginalized...
...Roosevelt and Lucy Mercer, Dwight Eisenhower and Kay Summersby, Gary Hart and Donna Rice. The story is still basically junk, a little sugar rush of news. But somehow the winter of 1992 feels a bit late for the prim old American Kabuki: the mayor caught in the whorehouse, the schoolmarm shaking her finger...