Rules-lawyer

And the pencil-necked geek is a fully juiced-up young vampire who has rules-lawyered himself around to some very interesting conclusions about his own freedom of action within the constraints Basil specified, and who is extremely pissed off right now because he has third-degree burns across most of his face.

Saladin, when fighting against the Crusades, famously rules-lawyered his way around this to kill the (richly deserving) Raynald of Châtillon, by giving water to his other prisoner, who then gave it to Raynald.

But as horrors made colony a dirty word, the Age of Empires gave way only to an Age of Excuses, when superpowers learned to rules-lawyer Justice, Democracy, even Freedom and Revolution into pliable excuses to meddle wheresover^([sic]) on the globe they smelled profit, but when less-profitable peoples begged for aid, poisoned by the superpowers’ fumes, and lies, and cruel investments, then the powers hid like children in the pillow-fort of their so-modern and so-rational directive not to interfere.