Word: venal
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...went on to topple Romeo Lucas García's depraved military dictatorship in 1982 - only to be ousted by another coup a year later. In 1988, retired from the military, Ríos Montt formed the frg as a foe of Guatemala's rigid and venal oligarchy - shrewdly casting himself as the kind of populist caudillo (strongman) that Latin voters still tend to favor. The Maya Indians' traditional quiet stoicism about past trauma has made it easier for Ríos Montt to sell his quasi-delusional version of the local paramilitary squads he helped form, which terrorized...
There has always been something desperately seductive about the U.S., something that European elites have regarded as a menace and a threat. To them, the U.S. was shallow, vulgar, uncultured, crass, inauthentic, materialistic, naive, venal and degenerate. At the same time, however, they could not deny that it was somehow irresistible and dangerously attractive—particularly to millions of Europe’s masses, who voted with their feet in hopes of attaining something in America that eluded them at home...
LENI RIEFENSTAHL might be remembered as cinema's greatest woman director or as its most gifted documentary filmmaker, whose two-part Olympia, a record of the 1936 Summer Games, pioneered techniques and attitudes copied in virtually all TV sports coverage. Instead, she is vilified as the venal genius who glamorized the Hitler myth in 1935's Triumph of the Will. This record of a Nazi Party Congress rally in Nuremberg still sickens with its close-up view of the spellbinding Fuhrer (this was the original Springtime for Hitler), still enthralls with the artful precision of its editing craft. A wily...
...prevailing accent is (accents are) American. I always figured they came over to hear how the language ought to be spoken; the English are so good at English. These days, it's heard more and more on the stage, emerging from the wisecracking mouths of some pretty nasty, venal or certifiably nutso characters. A team at the National is attempting a blend of the racy, rickety newspaper comedy "The Front Page" and its gender-switched movie version, the sublime "His Girl Friday." (This new version, by John Guare, keeps too much of the old play, and the show still...
...long been known in Iraq and beyond that as venal and vicious as Saddam Hussein was, Uday was worse. Now that the regime has fallen, the quotidian details of the son's outrages are beginning to emerge. With Iraqis free to speak more openly, it has become clear that the malignancy of Uday's behavior actually exceeded that of his reputation. At the same time, new hints are emerging about his psychological state. Uday, now 38, suffered not only from the anguish of Saddam's disapproval--the son was too unprincipled even for his father--but also often from physical...