devastating adj. 毁灭性的;破坏性的
fatal adj. 致命的;毁灭性的
But there are political ramifications, too, even if the consequences of these are less clear-cut. On the one hand, it forces elites out into the open where their deliberations and pronouncements might be judged against their actions. There are clearly benefits to this. The truly awful thing about the incident between then UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Gillian Duffy shortly before the last election was not just that he referred to her as that bigoted woman when he was in his car and didnt know the microphone was on. It was that only minutes before, he had told her she was a very good woman [who had] served the community when he did know they were on. That gave credence to the popular perception that the political class held voters in contempt. The problem wasnt that he got caught, it was that he did it in the first place.
hold in contempt 对不屑一顾;轻视
Left there, however, and what we have is not more openness, but more gaffes. Obama and Sarkozy deriding Binyamin Netanyahu, and Obama blabbing his post-election strategy for Russia, or Tony Blairs cringeworthy Yo, Blair encounter with George Bush at the G8. Entertaining and illustrative, certainly, but rarely more than that.
But on-mic embarrassment is not the whole story: the revelation of serious information that our rulers would rather we did not have can be compelling. WikiLeaks provides a good example. By redistributing information from the US government to the world, it gave the public an unprecedented insight into US diplomacy. Interestingly, most of what it revealed we might have guessed. But once it was out there, it was difficult for officialdom to deny it and one could argue that these were not their secrets to keep.
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