Hand to mouth?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Hand to mouth?

“Dead Men.” Last month in the New Statesman, onetime Punch Editor Malcolm Muggeridge fired even more wildly. Said Muggeridge, under the title “Dead Men Leading”: “Probably no powerful country in history has had quite so dead a government as the U.S. has today. It is not just a matter of the infirmities of its two principal figures—President Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. Apart from the decrepitude of the one and the fatal illness of the other, the government itself is scarcely operative.”

Last week the attack continued in full cry. The Observer spoke worriedly of the President’s “apparent incapacity for work or decision.” Asked the Sunday Express: “Has the time come for Ike to step down? . . . What chance has the free world when its leadership is in the hands of a man who can hardly perform his day-to-day tasks? How can we expect President Eisenhower to hold his own against Mr. Khrushchev, healthy, exuberant, indefatigable?”

“A Broken Man.” Said the Daily Herald: “Sick men can’t rule the world . . . It is the West’s tragedy that the President is NOT fit for service. At 68, America’s wartime hero is a broken man, incapable of the energy required to grasp important matters for any length of time.”

Said the New Statesman: “It is his capacity that is in doubt, not his will . . . The result is hand-to-mouth government, without either a set purpose or the political know-how to carry out whatever vague aims the President may conceive.”