Word: athwart
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...militant attacks since the army launched a wide-ranging military operation in the Swat Valley and two neighboring districts in a bid to wipe out the Taliban. Manned entries to the city have been beefed up with increased numbers of policemen searching vehicles, while sentries at all checkpoints lying athwart main roads have been given instructions to exercise greater vigilance...
...extremist - partly in the Barry Goldwater extremism-in-defense-of-liberty-is-no-vice sense of the word, but also in the wacky let's-relitigate-the-currency-debates-of-the-1820s sense of the word. The late William F. Buckley wanted conservatives to stand athwart history yelling stop; Paul seems to want to slam history into reverse. The guy genuinely wants to abolish the Federal Reserve and start circulating gold again...
...deserves much of the credit for the right-wing ascendancy of the past thirty years. Yet in spite of being a seminal presence in modern American history, he launched his career with a much different conception of the National Review’s purpose: “It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” That Buckley was dead wrong on pretty much every major historical issue of his time—McCarthyism, civil rights, Vietnam?...
When William F. Buckley Jr. revived American conservatism by founding National Review in 1955, he said the magazine's job was to stand "athwart history, yelling stop." At that time, history did seem to be moving in the wrong direction if you were a conservative, and Buckley was gutsy to admit as much. Later, during the Reagan era and after, conservatives enjoyed thinking that history was on their side. They saw themselves as riding it like a bronco, yelling not stop but faster! faster...
...course, you shouldn't change your principles just to be on the right side of history. Standing athwart history and yelling stop can be noble, and sometimes even works. But that's not what today's Republicans seem to be doing. They are chasing after history from a few yards behind...