But character flaws of intellectual arrogance and vanity, mingled with despair over the persistence of racism, sometimes made him form dubious alliances -- not only with the Soviets and Chinese but before World War II with the Japanese, on the theory that their imperialism was more humane than the European variety.
The experience, he said, makes him a dubious authority on the perils and temptations of today's big-money game.
He looked back to his best at Chester, but his chequered history makes him a dubious proposition at short odds against the reliable Midday.
Even with the greatest latitude for the cabinet, Senator Ashcroft's extreme-right politics make him a dubious choice for attorney general.
It wasn't only that Geithner's own tax history — and his time as head of the New York Fed when all the bad stuff was happening on Wall Street, and when he left with nearly a half-million in severance — makes him a dubious messenger for the president's pledge to keep the haves from further betraying the have-nots.
Seth C. Farber, head of litigation in Winston & Strawn's New York office, dismissed the idea that Mr. Shargel's representations of some dubious characters made him unfit for a big corporate firm.
But if the deal happens, the extravagant yet shy Mr Abramovich will bow out of Russia in a fittingly contradictory way: by helping the government to regain control of the country's energy resources, whose dubious privatisation made him and the other oligarchs billionaires.
Of course, his part in the murder of Rasputin was what would make him infamous, and his somewhat dubious tale of what occurred that night has been accepted as fact.
There is a rather dubious attempt to make him more human by establishing a friendship with a 12-year-old Iraqi boy who calls himself Beckham.
Some mixture of these philosophies, in fact--in an inarticulate, felt form--helped propel George W. into power, and made his dubious ascension remarkably untroubled and uncontested, given what was at stake and what was done to get him here.
