Word: ploy
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...terror schemes inside the U.S., the FBI is expected to dust off a few tricks developed during the Cold War to "bumper-lock" - confuse and immobilize - the KGB. A favorite: waves of double-agents, called "cold walk-ins," approach enemy agents and "volunteer" for nasty missions. If the ploy works, the FBI has achieved a penetration. Sooner or later the walk-ins are revealed as plants. IF they're burned a few times, so the theory goes, the Iraqis will suspect and reject even bonafide volunteers from al-Qaeda...
...their desolation with such intensity that they seem to have trained on maotai liquor instead of boiled noodles. There is no sign of Okafor. If his name was floated merely to warn the Americans?"killing the chicken to scare the monkey," in the words of a Chinese proverb?the ploy has worked, at least for one night...
...Union address. Bush, hoping to avoid the presidential shortfalls of his father, digressed from his seemingly constant rhetoric on a potential war in Iraq to briefly discuss the pivotal state of the domestic economy. Unfortunately, his plan to fix the struggling economy is overly simplistic and a thinly veiled ploy at satisfying his rich political base. And while Bush did promise funding for some praiseworthy and innovative programs that Democrats will be happy to support, these programs only served to distract eyes and minds away from his hawkish and conservative political agenda...
...details of Reston's rise within the Times, from his arrival as a raw reporter at age 29 to his takeover of the Washington bureau 15 years later, will intrigue any fan of bureaucratic politics. Stacks makes clear that Reston used every ploy of the classic man on the make. He sought and flattered professional patrons. He was useful and devoted to the Sulzberger family, which owned the Times--and to Katharine Graham, who kept trying to lure him to the Washington Post. He made pre-emptive strikes against in-house rivals. He lost only one major battle inside...
...investment banks smacks of opportunism and grandstanding, of a public official out of control. "This could have been handled more effectively away from the glare of the press," says a senior executive at one of the banks Spitzer has gone after. But if this is all a political ploy, a platform from which to run someday for, say, Governor of New York, it's certainly not in most politicians' playbooks to take on the moneymen who rank among the most powerful people in the U.S.--and whom he might need one day to help finance a campaign. Spitzer, a child...