Word of the Day

wastrel \WAY-struhl\, noun:
1. A person who wastes, especially one who squanders money; a spendthrift.
2. An idler; a loafer; a good-for-nothing.

He was a stock character in 19th-century fiction: the wastrel son who runs up gambling debts in the belief that his wealthy family, concerned for its prestige, will have no choice but to pay off his creditors…George Bush reminds me of those characters — and not just because of his early career, in which friends of the family repeatedly bailed out his failing business ventures. Now that he sits in the White House, he’s still counting on other people to settle his debts — not to protect the reputation of his family, but to protect the reputation of the country. Paul Krugman

He was a wastrel youth of enormous privilege and arrogance, I said, propped up by his family's money and his father's connections, a man who went bust at everything he tried to do on his own, yet who, somehow, always emerged unscathed. After he got himself elected - or after the first of two elections was stolen for him, if you will - it became obvious that he was a puppet whose strings were held by many masters. Joyce Marcel

Rove helped Bush Jr. transform himself from rich-dilettante wastrel into rich-dilettante-wastrel-with-power in 1994, acting as his political adviser in Dubya's successful run for Texas governor. According to ABC News, more than half of the campaign's nearly $1 million budget went to Rove. Considering the challenge of making Bush look good, the sum was probably not out of line. Rotten

And in the end, a wastrel who once actively avoided combat could don a fighter costume and be hailed as a hero, while a decorated veteran could be effectively ridiculed as an indecisive waffler in a windsurfing wetsuit. Blogcritics