Word: despots
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...revised vision of the presidential role, Giscard can be haughty and even arrogant. No better example exists than the furor aroused by a gift of diamonds he received from former Central African Despot Jean-Bédel Bokassa. When the issue was first raised in October 1979 Giscard stubbornly refused to divulge details. Last month the President disingenuously justified the delay in facing the issue by saying that "no one ever asked me the question." He said that the diamonds had been sold, and the proceeds donated to charity. That donation, it turned out was made only a month before...
...voter concern focuses on the power he has accumulated during his term. Few disagree that he has concentrated presidential authority to a greater degree than either De Gaulle or Georges Pompidou, his two Fifth Republic predecessors. "France is governed by an elected sovereign, a republican monarch, almost an enlightened despot " writes French Journalist Alain Duhamel [Giscard] is at the same time the Queen of England and Her Majesty's Prime Minister...
...Half of them are Americans, half Ambolanders; three are women. (All are played by Bob Gunton.) These "historical events" serve as avatars and parodies of the looking-glass warriors, and most of them are perversely delightful. Mme. Ing, the patrician Borgia who rules Amboland, ends every discussion with the despot's stern logic: "Mme. Ing has won that argument," she purrs. U.S. Army Lieutenant Thibodeaux brags that the service "taught me how to fight and how to swear"-and then demonstrates just how poorly he learned at least one of those lessons as he expectorates a stream of hilariously...
...recent article in Foreign Affairs, Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes from his exile in Vermont how a peasant family in the middle of Russia wants simply to be left alone: "If only the petty local Communist despot would somehow quit his uncontrolled tyranny, if only they could get enough to eat for once, and buy shoes for the children, and lay in enough fuel for the winter, if only they could have sufficient space to live even two to a room...
...find it incredible that you published an article in which you admitted that the Shah used torture and murder to sustain his regime, and then excused him for those deeds because he wasn't as bad as Hitler. Well, my God-who is? How inhuman does a despot have to be for his evil to outweigh his usefulness...