[Jersey Republican Biker Chick]

Doug, this thread is right up you alley!!!

[theDentist]

Oh, feckless. I thought it said something else.

[opineapple]

While Clinton Fiddled

A story of fecklessness in the face of terror.

BY DICK MORRIS

Some of the president's staff and his consultants pressed the case for aggressive action to contain terror at home and attack it abroad. But at the center of the storm, Bill Clinton sat with an unusual imperturbability. Even as he fretted about whether to sign the welfare reform act and brooded about the FBI file, Paula Jones and Whitewater scandals, he seemed curiously uninvolved in the battle against terror.

The real question, however, is why Mr. Clinton was so tentative in the war on terror. Everything else seemed to come first. He wouldn't toughen immigration enforcement because he feared a backlash from his political base. He waived sanctions against companies doing business with Iran because he worried about European reaction. There was no effort to cut off the flow of money to terror fronts because Janet Reno raised civil libertarian concerns. (Mr. Clinton did freeze the Hamas assets, but since they didn't maintain accounts in their own name, it netted no money.)

Bill Clinton revealed himself as a man of the 20th century while Mr. Bush has understood that Sept. 11, 2001, marked the beginning of a new era. In Bill Clinton's epoch, terror was primarily a criminal justice problem which must not be allowed to get in the way of the "real" foreign-policy issues--relations with Russia and China and the dynamics of the Western alliance. Indeed, if Mr. Clinton had any personal stamp on foreign policy, it was the subordination of military and security issues to economic concerns.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=95001824

[bert]

FECKLESS

[Q] From Lee Burough in Colorado Springs, USA: “We’ve never heard the word feckless here in our part of the USA. Yet we hear it occasionally in BBC television productions. What is its origin? Why isn’t it used here?”

[A] These days it’s not particularly common anywhere, I would guess, though I’m surprised it has completely vanished from your part of the world; on the other hand, it does tend to appear more often in writing than in speech, and to my ear it does sound a touch old-fashioned. It’s an excellent example of a word for which only the negative now exists; some other examples are gormless, ruthless, and hapless. At first feck was a Scots word, a cropped form of effect, so to say that a person is feckless is to describe them as ineffective. But it also suggests more strongly that a person is lazy, incompetent, unreliable, or irresponsible. It’s a powerful word, one it would be good to keep in the language. Try using it a few times—perhaps you’ll persuade people to take it up again ...

[Zacs Mom]

Here are a few more for your collection ~

[infidel29]

marking.... much information here, thanks.