Word: mates
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...Ozzies, though we'd rather you Yanks dropped the dumb pseudo-intimacy altogether and just called us Australians) are all supposed to be as straight as Harrison Ford or John Wayne, despite our superficially confusing habit of addressing a friend or a stranger of the same sex as "mate...
...much paraded dislike of ?litism. Mateship - essentially, male bonding - began in the harsh world of the penal settlement. It continued in the hardly less tough environment of labor that was the lot of most men in the bush: shearers, station hands, shepherds. To have a mate was to survive; to betray that mate was to be a scab, less than a man; such was the hard calculus of colonial life, and its traces are very much alive in Australia today...
...make that hardly visible) running mate even got off a good one at the expense of his opposite, who's been making Cheney look like the dud of the slate. "One observer of the military," Cheney said Wednesday, "had this to say last year: 'Our military faces readiness problems,' he cautioned, 'including falling recruitment, and retention in critical skill areas; aging equipment that costs more to keep operating at acceptable levels of reliability; a need for more support services for a force with a high percentage of married personnel; and frequent deployments...
...They haven't found one yet. But the military is at least a credible issue for Cheney, if he doesn't oversell it (which he seems wont to do). And if it helps this running mate find his stride - one of Cheney's big problems so far is that he seems to want to give straight answers on TV, which inevitable leads to adjectives like "visibly frustrated" in the newspapers - this detour into matters military will be well worth it for a campaign that lately seems to have lost its true north...
...much for working in mysterious ways. So much, for that matter, for the AARP being the most powerful lobby in Washington. Forty years after JFK had to promise his Catholicism would have no effect on his presidency, God, whether Christian or Jewish, is everybody's running mate on the campaign trail this year. And the backlash - from folks who actually believe that old saw about the separation of church and state - may finally be starting to rain down...