Word: calm
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...hard to believe after one of the bloodiest weeks of the current Israeli-Palestinian clashes, but both Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat appear to be moving to calm the situation. The decision by Israel's security cabinet Thursday to refrain from another high-profile military retaliation to Wednesday's car bomb that killed two people in northern Israel is a sign that Israel's prime minister has recognized the danger in trying to shoot his way out of a crisis...
...much as Barak and Arafat may want to calm the conflict now, it remains unclear to what extent they're able to control the situation. On the Palestinian side, Arafat's authority is increasingly challenged not only by the Islamist radicals of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but also by the rank and file of his own Fatah organization, whose militia have led the street confrontations with Israeli forces for the past two months. Barak, too, has to deal with some very angry generals and even angrier Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, and there remains vast potential...
...them they had a lead that was insurmountable. The margin would shrink, but then "it was just a matter of hanging on to the cliff by our fingers," remembers McKinnon. The problem is "each finger kept getting stepped on." He and Ferguson nipped out for a little tequila to calm their nerves. Rove, who was wearing his phone headset all evening, was calling a statistics professor in Texas for his analysis of how the numbers were running, and then yelling, "Get me Dowd!" to his secretary, whereupon Dowd would turn up with the latest news he had gathered from surfing...
This is what's happening in this most uncertain hour, when not only do we feel like a single place but also experience a useful sense of calm in the middle of lawyers. For that we can thank the Founders for inventing a constitutional structure that provides a safety net for the uncertain hours. And the country is held together by will as well. On TV, the handlers of the two candidates continue to warn against fistfights in the halls, but they are the only ones likely to throw a punch. The rest of us--perhaps because the election...
Tocqueville said that one "can still consider the election of the president as a period of national crisis... The entire nation falls into a feverish state." But then, he wrote, "As soon as fortune has pronounced... this ardor is dissipated, everything becomes calm, and the river, one moment overflowed, returns peacefully...