Word: schemers
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Their Mao is bad to the core, a relentlessly selfish and duplicitous schemer as a young man who harbored "a love for bloodthirsty thuggery." And then he turned really nasty. Mao purged and murdered rivals. He pigged out on exotic delicacies amid the mass starvation his policies caused. (The authors cite estimates that 38 million people died of starvation and overwork during the Great Leap Forward. Mao, meanwhile, stuck to his misguided industrialization plans, blithely commenting that "half of China may well have to die.") In the 1970s, Mao even forbade surgery for his loyal No. 2, Zhou Enlai...
...Bones are a peculiar-looking, diminutive race. They are pure cartoon - cute and pantsless, with four fingers on each hand and smooth, rounded, sexless bodies. At first their personalities are similarly simple. Fone, the dreamy one, must constantly get out of the scrapes created by Phoney, the avaricious schemer, and Smiley, a goofball comic foil whose tongue hangs out like a friendly dog's. Over the book's course the characters change in subtle ways. Fone goes from the book's main character to being its Hero, just as Smiley's foolishness has an almost saintly quality...
...businessmen up for a big promotion are judged on the basis of who has the best wife for the job. We are no longer impressed with the notion of the woman behind the man. Lady Macbeth--never a good role model, to be sure--looks less like a brilliant schemer and more like a needy victim of unequal opportunity. In many states, it is now illegal even to ask whether a job applicant is married. Politics is not quite as advanced. Although women are streaming into elected office, plenty are still loyally trailing along after their politico husbands, chatting...
...tribunals. Unless Moussaoui's prosecutors yank the case into a tribunal, it would mean that they would have to pursue much reduced charges. Instead of proving Moussaoui to be an actor in a plot that murdered thousands, they would have to accuse him of simply being a me-too schemer whose efforts went nowhere...
...that matter, why didn't anyone think of playing a rogue CIA agent the way Johnny Depp does? He's polite, dry witted, a bit of a gourmet, but also a master schemer and a psycho who thinks nothing of offing a chef who has offended him. It's an alarmingly funny performance by a fabulously daring actor, and it sets the tone for a movie that is not to be taken seriously--except as a bedazzling step forward in the admittedly amoral aesthetics of violence...