And, sad to say, it made them - and, by extension, us - look somewhat foolish.
The Cocteau Belle (daughter of a somewhat foolish merchant) is by turns noble and forgetful, fiercely courageous and oddly indolent.
You say that "[Prime Minister John] Howard was left looking somewhat foolish" for not intervening to overturn mandatory sentencing in the Northern Territory.
There is certainly truth in this, but it makes King look the somewhat foolish and passive recipient of his own genius.
"We would be somewhat foolish to work on something on stopping us from going over the cliff, and a month or six weeks later, the Republicans pull the same thing they did before and say, 'We're not going to do anything unless this happens or we don't increase the debt ceiling,' " Mr. Reid said.
Other notable cast members: Cindy Katz, who plays Mozart's somewhat foolish but sexy wife, Constanze, and David McCallum, who is quite funny as the Hapsburg king, Joseph II, not a stupid man and, when he attends to a situation, often astute.
In Old Comedy, there is normally an idealistic, if somewhat foolish, protagonist who challenges the status quo in some ultimate way, by inhibiting sacrifices to the gods, or by entering Hades to retrieve a dead poet, or by persuading the women of Athens to go on a sex strike.
I chant this over and over in my head, feeling somewhat foolish, but surprisingly the pain dulls.
