When they came, he didn't perform the false courtesy of offering one or making a show.
What makes his book most moving is the way in which this man, without disrespecting his own privacy or offering false bromides of modesty (what Douthat derides as "ostentatious humility"), opens the sacred space of his conscience to explain how he came to center his ministry, and now his papacy, around mercy.
Today, Detroit is seeking to undo the carbon-cutting fuel efficiency targets agreed to during the Obama administration, again offering the false promise of green breakthroughs tomorrow.
By offering the false promise of disposability, of consumption without cost, it has helped create a culture of wasteful make-believe, an economy of forgetting.
That would be a mistake, offering the false promise of reform while giving the governor and legislators an excuse to delay any real changes for years.
Of particular relevance is the introduction of the notion of a design discharge to ensure that the structure is not just offering a false sense of security to the community.
Those dreams you have after a bad meal, where you toss and toil in a state of discomfort and frustration, unable to settle on any satisfying narrative groove, where reason and reality is ever shifting, offering the false promise of a respite around the corner that never actually comes?
Opponents answer that such parallels are specious, that ballistic missiles are not analogous to the carrier-launched fighter-bombers that destroyed Pearl Harbor but rather to the bullets that those planes fired, and that the Bush administration is offering the false hope of shooting down bullets with bullets.
Think twice about offering a false choice of procedures like cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) when someone is actually dying and chances of recovery are minuscule.
