Word: ineptness
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...ruthlessness. The cardinal rule of coupmaking, says Edward Luttwak of Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies, is "to seize control of all the centers of power in one fell swoop, to paralyze the situation." Even banana republics know this. The Gang of Eight was inexplicably though mercifully inept. Perhaps the conspirators picked up some debilitatingly humane manners during the Gorbachev era. They did not launch a coup but proffered a sort of half-coup, saying complimentary things about Gorbachev and holding out the possibility of working with him again. The Gang was a bit like an assassin named...
Every day, managers across America must summon the courage to let inept subordinates go, but somehow occupants of the Oval Office seem unable to deliver the bad news. In 1958 Dwight Eisenhower endured the turmoil surrounding his chief aide, Sherman Adams, accused of taking favors from wealthy industrialist Bernard Goldfine. Then one day Ike decided he had to make "the hardest, most hurtful decision" he had ever made and fire Adams. Even then he could not do it face-to-face. He summoned Republican National Committee chairman Meade Alcorn and handed him "the dirtiest job I could give you." Alcorn...
...defined by perilous, off-balance relationships between men and women. The year's two top box-office winners, The Silence of the Lambs and Sleeping with the Enemy, dramatize the ( judicious revenge that a woman takes on a brutalizing man. In another new film, Alan Rudolph's dour and inept Mortal Thoughts, two women (Demi Moore and Glenne Headly) kill a hateful husband (Bruce Willis, who lately can't seem to get a break). The trend straddles oceans too: Luc Besson's stylish French thriller, La Femme Nikita, is about a woman (Anne Parillaud) whose romantic life conflicts with...
...Defense Secretary Dick Cheney felt that the anti-Saddam coalition was shaky and believed that Congress was not prepared to authorize the use of force on short notice. According to Woodward, Cheney also thought the White House's handling of last year's budget negotiations with Congress was "inept" and "raised fundamental questions about whether Bush and the Cabinet knew what they were doing...
...dead son's alleged attempt at an incestuous rape -- even to summaries of children's grade school report cards and prep school fraternizing. No fact, it appears, is too intrusive or too repetitive for Tifft and Jones; the point that these communications moguls were personally inept at communicating is made over and over, as is the matching irony that a pair of chilly, detached parents felt lifelong sexual heat for each other. Amid all this, however, is a thoughtful group portrait wrapped into a cautionary tale about wealth: half the family were crushed by the burden of duty, the other...