Yet as Europe's immediate response to the Dubai operation makes clear, Europe itself has abandoned the sober-minded pursuit of its own interests, in favor of cowardly, feckless, self-defeating rhetoric.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: When rhetoric rules the roost

The idea of doing a dirty Lassie movie is wittier than its execution in this go-for-the-gonads sci-fi flick about a huge guard dog named Max who becomes ultra-possessive of a feckless TV reporter (Ally Sheedy) after she springs him from an animal-experimentation lab.

NEWYORKER: Man��s Best Friend

Though New Orleanians narrowly re-elected their feckless mayor, Ray Nagin, in 2006, that election now seems an aberration.

ECONOMIST: New Orleans five years after Katrina

But look, he has also on other occasions said, when he gets - once John McCain gets to the required number of delegates - and that really is feckless, and I think Mike Huckabee will see it that way a little later on this week - and pull out.

NPR: Day of Reckoning Ahead for Clinton, Obama

They aren't feckless, they aren't work-shy and they aren't scroungers.

BBC: UK Politics

Yet the IRS seems to go overboard, often painting an abused spouse as a willing accomplice to her tax-cheat husband or a feckless ignoramus spending money she should have known was owed for taxes.

FORBES: Read Innocent Spouse Expos�� Now!

"Financialphobes can be intelligent people who are high achievers in most areas of their lives - they are not irresponsible, feckless or spendthrift, " said Dr Brendan Burchell, of Cambridge University's faculty of social and political sciences.

BBC: One in five 'suffers banking phobia'

One looks at a handsome young stage actor like Stephen Campbell Moore, who, as the hero, Adam Fenwick-Symes, has penetrating eyes, and one thinks, Why is this fine-looking young man behaving in such a feckless and stupid way?

NEWYORKER: Bright Young Things

He captures both the unpredictable menace of Mesrine and his near-comical showmanship the sense of a feckless free spirit who grew convinced, thanks in large part to the media, that he was something greater.

NEWYORKER: Mesrine