These men, good and bad, many of them Irish and intimate with the ways of the mob, suffer the same agonies: time is slipping past, the previous arrangements are shaky, and loyalties to the old neighborhood grow weaker every day.
His judgment seems wild, his beliefs vary according to the prevailing wind, and his sense of loyalty is shaky.
In his final column for Commonweal, Mr. O'Gara said that some critics used the term "Commonweal Catholic" as a label for someone with shaky theology or dubious loyalty.
And then we wonder why our relationships with clients feel shaky, our employees lack loyalty and our friends and partners seem distant.
After a season of suspect loyalties and shaky resolve among its main characters, the show's finale promises a familiar source of suspense: Will Carrie save a Western city from a jihadist plot?
The Samata Party's loyalty to the shaky government coalition has been secured, at least temporarily.
The British say the Sussex, the flagship of a large flotilla, carried a fortune in treasure to buy the loyalty of a shaky ally in a war against France.
And government corruption is so rampant — the local police are routinely accused of shaking down and sexually abusing residents — that loyalty to the government remains shaky at best.
So, although it would seem shaky to rest the entire monetization structure on loyalty-type programs, the large majority of merchants have bought in.
The flagship, a new British warship of 80 guns and 500 men, appears to have carried a small fortune in treasure to buy the loyalty of the Duke of Savoy, a shaky ally.
