Word: cudgels
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Still, victims are keeping their expectations low: the ultrasecretive order that Maciel built, like some shadowy fraternity from a Dan Brown novel, may be simply too powerful to cudgel. Established in 22 countries, it operates nine universities, 125 religious houses and more than 160 schools. In the U.S. alone it runs 21 élite Catholic prep schools, a university in Sacramento, Calif., and some of the only seminaries for teenage boys in the U.S. at a time when the American priesthood's ranks are thinning exponentially. In Mexico, the children of telecom billionaire Carlos Slim, one of the world...
...criticized across Iran's political spectrum, for incompetence in signing away a uranium stockpile created at considerable geopolitical expense, and for even accepting a link between that stockpile and Iran's need for fuel for a medical research reactor. And as anger at the uranium-swap deal became a cudgel in the hands Ahmadinejad's domestic rivals, his government began demanding changes in the agreement...
...Angola or Teodoro Obiang in Equatorial Guinea (both in their 30th), while Africa's most enduring autocrat, Gabon's Omar Bongo, died in June in his 42nd year in office. Criticism has actually strengthened Mugabe, allowing him to cast himself as a heroic defender of Africa taking up the cudgel, just as he did when he led the fight for independence against racist Western imperialism...
...Duncan Hunter set the slime flowing in the presidential campaign. The theme was soon picked up by Mitt Romney, who seems incapable of finding an issue where integrity trumps expediency. Romney has made illegal immigration the target of recent campaign ads. He has used the issue as a cudgel against Rudy Giuliani (a passionately pro-immigrant mayor trying to sound like a tough guy now), even though Romney reportedly employed illegal workers to do his gardening and didn't seem concerned about the issue when he was Governor of Massachusetts - until he decided to run for President...
...word amnesty was still used as a cudgel at the G.O.P. debate - McCain's rivals clobbered him with the term, and he turned it on them as well, saying that doing nothing is "silent and de facto amnesty." Why are the bill's supporters so skittish about the word? If the past five years of immigration debate have taught us anything, it's that railing against the illegal invasion is easy, popular and effective. Now politicians are being roasted for conceding a reality: illegal or not, most of those 12 million are here to stay...