During the Cuban missile crisis, when Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze disparaged some of President John F Kennedy's more cautious decisions by calling him a"pantywaist," he made it clear that anyone who let himself be governed by fear of setting off a nuclear war was a sissy.

Fred's idea of parenting was hard-nosed: "He was the type of father," one relative says, "who taught his children to swim by throwing them into a pool and walking away." It must have mortified him when his oldest son turned out to be a pantywaist.

My Hillsdale College comrade Paul Rahe, while accepting much of my thesis, thought that, as an effete milquetoast pantywaist sissified foreigner, I had missed a vital distinction.

His pantywaist deportment leads some to suspect hypocrisy, assuming that Bachmann is himself closeted.

But I flicked over to the letter P: '"Pantywaist",' I read, laughing.

Today's House Republicans are even more conservative than their predecessors; should the GOP ever get back control of the House, it'll be Issa--not some pantywaist Republican-in-Name-Only from Connecticut--who will be in charge of the oversight committee, ready to rain subpoenas down on the Obama administration.

But that seems like a whiny complaint from a pantywaist author whose books didn't sell as well as Borat's or Colbert's.

Because he's a pantywaist. Waits and Dylan spit in your eye and dare you to challenge their voices, the vehicles of choice for their marrowful poetry, biting, satiric, and thoughtful versus Yorke's artsy, pretentious, adolescent twaddle.

Stop acting like a pantywaist and go sign the damn papers.

Milksop, Pantywaist, Foolish-Elastic; names are plastic

You can coax a buck with a grunt tube or challenge him with rattling antlers, and he'll respond like a bull moose instead of the pantywaist, daylight-shy, brush-hiding skulker he is for the other 11 months of the year.

problem, the cameras mercilessly outing the big pantywaist within....