Word: pyrrhically
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...long run. Says Maria Lewis of Shearson Lehman Bros.: "AT&T would make an ideal corporate parent." Still, the deal carries enormous financial risks for AT&T, which had tried to build a computer business from scratch, avoiding large acquisitions. "AT&T will triumph, but it may be a Pyrrhic victory," says John McCarthy, an analyst at Forrester Research. "It's buying itself a land mine of problems...
Lenny Bruce's triumph was posthumous, and maybe Pyrrhic: because of him, Andrew Dice Clay can make millions reciting dirty nursery rhymes in public. Clay and the other new raunch artists, most of them, are only incidentally subversive. They don't believe for a moment, most of them, what they're saying. Metal musicians are no serious Satanists; their concerts are just theater pieces -- Cats with a nasty yowl. Clay is not the pathetic strutting stud he seems onstage; that's just a character. (Was Jack Benny really stingy? Is Pee-wee Herman really a goony child?) Bruce said what...
Later Kissinger turned his fire on the Pentagon and contributed to Gerald Ford's decision to replace James Schlesinger with Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. It was a Pyrrhic victory. In 1976 Rumsfeld undermined Kissinger's attempt to negotiate an arms-control treaty with the Soviet Union. Why? Because detente had become a political liability to Ford in an election year...
...reasonable in that context. Editor Eugene Roberts of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted, "After every press conference, where often you can't hear very well, you will see three or four variations on the same quote. Just about every time, the intent was preserved." To others, the victory seemed Pyrrhic. Said editor Bill Monroe of the Washington Journalism Review: "I don't see how any journalist can be happy with a judge condoning tampering with specific quotes...
...fair manner that people can speak, that they will not be shouted down, or that the process be so disrupted that meetings will have to be adjourned. Let me tell you that when the meeting had been forced to adjourn, I was at first elated by this Pyrrhic victory, thinking something to the effect of "that will show them." Show what? I now wonder. Show that even at Harvard, undergraduates can be shouted down by fellow undergraduates...