Kerry is less prone than some others in Washington to throw around threats about war being an option that is "on the table", and it is hard to imagine him blithely reminding Iranians, as Clinton did, that the United States has the power "to totally obliterate them".
Our unilateralists twice drove blithely through those gates, imagining that they were the gates to paradise.
It's hard to imagine a President today blithely explaining, as Roosevelt supposedly did to an aide when people were slightly horrified by his appointment of Joseph Kennedy to the S.E.C., "it takes a thief to catch a thief".
It's easy to imagine a youthful Ms. Holm blithely tossing her fur there after a night on the Broadway stage.
It takes a monumental inability to imagine other peoples' lives to blithely praise welfare reform's results at a time like this.
This week it is difficult to imagine anyone being quite so blithely inattentive to the complex realities of this vast and varied nation.
The first was: Why did I so blithely assume that I had the right to imagine my way into old age — and that I could do it well — when I would approach with extreme caution the task of imagining my way into the interior world of a character of a different gender, race, or class?
It is hard to imagine, for example, that justices with substantial political experience would blithely assume that defending against the Paula Corbin Jones sexual harassment suit would not be a burden for Bill Clinton.
As she chatters on her way to the photo shoot, blithely halting the traffic as she crosses a busy London road, it's hard to imagine this effervescent woman in the grip of a confidence crisis.
Imagine something like Franz Suchomel, the S.S. officer whose recollections were filmed secretly in "Shoah," blithely re-staging a gas-chamber execution with B-movie ineptitude — Claude Lanzmann meets "American Movie".
