Word: machiavellianism
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...Dave -- how'd you like to make a full-time job of it? This suits the Machiavellian purposes of chief of staff Bob Alexander (played with joyously evil relish by Frank Langella). As his name suggests, he combines the less attractive traits of Bob Haldeman and Alexander Haig. He's been running Mitchell (whom Kline also plays), and he's not about to abandon power gracefully. Besides, this putz should be a pushover...
...Gondoliers is fantastic in the extreme. Shortly after the dual marriage it turns out that one of the brothers (needless to say, no one knows which) is really the King of Barataria, who was stolen away as a baby. Both men are rushed off to the palace by the Machiavellian Grand Inquisitor, who has been hurried into action by the arrival of the Duke and Duchess of Plaza-Toro. It seems that their daughter Casilda was married in infancy to the young King and they now want her to take her rightful place as Queen. Casilda, meanwhile, is secretly...
...Johnson is kind of a super maitre d', a guy who really knows how to work a room," Gelbart explains. But in the book, Burrough and Helyar also portray him as a Machiavellian cutthroat who betrayed numerous colleagues on his way - to the top, a spendthrift who moved the RJR Nabisco headquarters to Atlanta -- callously firing thousands of employees in the process -- in part because he didn't like "bucolic" Winston-Salem, and a derelict CEO who repeatedly misled his shareholders, his employees and his board of directors...
...Machiavellian Chimps...
...answer may be politics, which is hardly confined to human society. Scottish psychologists Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten believe chimps are positively "Machiavellian" in their efforts to acquire power within a group. In the Mahale Mountains in Tanzania, for instance, Japanese primatologist Toshisada Nishida observed one male chimp shift his support between two more dominant males who needed his allegiance to maintain power. The bigger males curried favor with this artful manipulator by allowing him access to fertile females. When a ruler began to take him for granted, the canny old chimp would shift allegiance to the pretender, thus ensuring...