Word: ploy
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...justification. To point to a leader who symbolizes the Catholic Church and the values which it embodies and brand him the culprit of unfortunate social ills makes no sense. Insulting a religious group to make a political statement shows poor taste and amounts to little more than a cheap ploy for attention on Sinead's part. Sinead's Rolling Stone photo shows her in a shirt which reads "Recovering Catholic." Maybe Catholicism did not work for Sinead. But she has no excuse to defile the religion in such an offensive manner...
...Moscow trip. But he redoubled his attacks on the Democrat's antiwar record. Coming on the eve of the crucial first debate, the apparent aim of the Bush strategy was to sow new doubts about Clinton's trustworthiness and rattle the Democrat into making fresh gaffes. But the ploy, smacking as it does of dirty tricks, could well backfire. "This kind of attack makes Bush look more strident and less presidential," says Ed Rollins, a former Republican strategist. "Unless Bush does something that suddenly convinces voters he would be a different President in his second term, Clinton could win with...
...Perot would come in for keeps, or just for kicks. Perot met last week with White House chief of staff James Baker, in part to determine whether Bush might adopt Perot's own rigorous plan for fixing the nation's economic problems. Bush officials regarded that probe as a ploy. Said one: "He was just going through the necessary steps so he could say when he got in that 'Bush isn't serious about fixing the problem...
Suspicious Stats. Maybe it's related to declining math scores, but these days the favored ploy is to taint by numbers. If a politician rattles off more than three statistics about his opponent's record, assume that at least one of those figures is a flat-out falsehood, yanked completely out of context and massaged by friendly computers. The more precise the number, the higher the likelihood of prevarication. Senator Joe McCarthy would never have set off the 1950s witch-hunts if he had merely claimed, "There are, I don't know, maybe 100, maybe 200 communists in the State...
Mitterrand, whose reputation as a political genius had already been tarnished by his appointment of Edith "Anglo Saxons are homosexuals and Japanese are ants" Cresson as Prime Minister last year, has seen his ploy--and his popularity--explode in his face...