On this most vexed of issues, APEC's mushiness may be a virtue.
A top Slovak politician, Frantisek Miklosko, has made a personal apology to Hungarians for their post-war deportation and repression.Mr Klaus loathes all this, seeing it as the kind of elitist mushiness that was a trademark of his predecessor.
To win, the "black-yellow" tandem needed Ms Merkel's mushiness, too.
Rather than the mushiness and astringent saltiness – the staples of cheap anchovies – you get something that is meaty, firm and ever so slightly sweet.
Both are troubled by an initial mushiness, which continues in normal but switches to a rush of energy in sport at a point infuriatingly hard to define.
The charm of the early scenes is undermined by the mushiness and predictability with which the rest of the film unfolds.
On the other hand, there are times, during his lunch with the two ersatz Muslim donors, when Ron Schiller's patter betrays a political mushiness that one encounters on the coasts and in college towns, a partly informed progressivism that makes me want to hide my head under the nearest tote bag.
But it's no mulatto sentimentalism, no simplistic "ebony and ivory" tale of racial mushiness.
Possibly, but it's not winter yet, and there's a coherence to the mushiness of it all.
His treatment of the restless opening theme of Beethoven's "Waldstein" Sonata was swift and flooding, almost to the point of mushiness, but what resulted was an excitingly stark, if broad, contrast with his elegant, deliberate take on the second theme.
THIS trend, made famous by books like Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone," has encouraged both the theological mushiness of those who say they are "spiritual, not religious" as well as the unfiltered fury that has come to characterize both ends of the political spectrum.
