Favors are exchanged – some routine political horse-trading, others more venal.
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Critics, many of whom also denounced the initial ban, saw something far more venal at play.
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The more venal Hongshi, allying himself with a scheming minister (Dinh James Doan), uses a mechanical bird, powered by a hidden human, to deceive his sibling into abandoning the living Nightingale's counsel.
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There are more venal motives, too: if parliament is dissolved before September, almost two-thirds of the deputies and senators (those who entered parliament at the last election in 2013) will lose their right to a pension.
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But we're reliably told that the president has a second and more venal agenda: He is attempting to force Mr. Zelensky to intervene in the 2020 U.S. presidential election by launching an investigation of the leading Democratic candidate, Joe Biden.
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The political journalist who opposed Nixon and everything he stood for with every fiber of his being would not have taken kindly to a GOP president who was even more venal, who lied more frequently, who actually looked more like his Ralph Steadman caricature than even jowly old Tricky Dick.
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" In "The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster," the journalist Jonathan M. Katz writes, "It's not that politicians in Haiti are more venal, petty or brutal than elsewhere; it's just that, too often, that's all there is to them.
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Those were the years when America decided to embrace what Hunter S. Thompson, writing about Nixon, called "the werewolf in us: the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts on nights when the moon comes too close…" As recent events reveal, we needed to replace that shabby, pathetic, predatory episode with an updated monstrosity that, in less than 100 days, has already proven to be shabbier and more venal, petty, paranoid, and delusional than Nixon ever was.
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At the end of the episode, Satan returns and sorts out whatever new problem Scumspawn has managed to create. The final two episodes of the series feature a new arrival, Roland (Geoffrey Whitehead), a damned soul even more venal and corrupt than Thomas who tries to organise a rebellion of the demons in Hell with Thomas's help, with exactly the same degree of success that Gary and Thomas had in Series 1. In the end, after easily dealing with the insurrection, Satan decides he need not worry, as humans will soon be extinct anyway. In order to hasten mankind's demise, he turns himself into Jeb Bush and plots to convince Jeb's brother George Bush to launch a nuclear strike on the polar icecaps.
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The supernatural is placed outside conventional fantasy settings and presented as a natural part of a realistic world, bringing about its grotesque nature. This trait is embodied in the Journey to the West and other shenmo parodies of the late Qing dynasty. In A Ridiculous Journey to the West (Wuli qunao zhi xiyouji) by Wu Jianwen, the protagonist Bare-Armed Gibbon, a more venal version of Sun Wukong, aids the Vulture King once he is unable to wring any money out of a penniless fish that the vulture had caught and dropped in a puddle. The monkey returns in another Wu Jianwen story, Long Live the Constitution (Lixian wansui), and bickers with other characters from Journey to the West over a constitution for Heaven.
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Similarly, Altino Matos writing for Journal de Angola saw the film as a message of hope, writing, "With this union of humans and aliens comes a feeling that something better exists in the universe: the respect for life." Cameron confirmed that "the Na'vi represent the better aspects of human nature, and the human characters in the film demonstrate the more venal aspects of human nature." Conversely, David Brooks of The New York Times opined that Avatar creates "a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism", an offensive cultural stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic and that illiteracy is the path to grace. A review in the Irish Independent found the film to contrast a "mix of New Age environmentalism and the myth of the Noble Savage" with the corruption of the "civilized" white man.
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The article also quoted experts on the Orthodox Jewish world, with Joel Cohen arguing that: Some have suggested that the informant should be termed a moser— an informant who illegitimately reports the conduct of fellow Jew to a non- Rabbinic authority. The Rabbinical Council of California spokesman commented that the body has discussed the issue but declined to take a position. Samuel Heilman of City University of New York commented on the controversy in The Forward: "There is a great temptation among these rabbis, who come from a culture that often views the 'government' as in the hands of enemies, to believe that for 'higher' motives is acceptable; in fact, often their temptations are driven by more venal and selfish aims than they might acknowledge."Hasidic Leaders Arrested, Marc Perelman, The Forward, December 26, 2007 Weisz and Zigelman appeared in court on December 31, 2007.
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