Word: pivots
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Every war has its fateful pivot, when the high-altitude bombs lose their persuasive power and politics becomes a sideshow, when soldiers must hit the ground and fight and everyone else braces for something terrible. This war turned last Thursday night. Throughout the day, combat helicopters had carried U.S. special-operations troops ashore from the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk, anchored in the Arabian Sea off the southern coast of Pakistan. The forces choppered over miles of desert terrain to an airstrip at Dalbandin, close to Pakistan's secret underground nuclear-test site and just south of the Afghan border. There they...
Every war has its fateful pivot, when the high-altitude bombs lose their persuasive power and politics becomes a sideshow, when soldiers must hit the ground and fight and everyone else braces for something terrible. This war turned last Thursday night. Throughout the day, combat helicopters had carried U.S. special-operations troops ashore from the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk, anchored in the Arabian Sea off the southern coast of Pakistan. The forces choppered over miles of desert terrain to an airstrip at Dalbandin, close to Pakistan's secret underground nuclear-test site and just south of the Afghan border. There they...
Trouble is, it's all about politics too. Last week, just hours before Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi met at Camp David with George W. Bush, Okinawa saw the type of ugly incident that happens there with depressing regularity--becoming, once again, a tawdry pivot in the complex relationship between the U.S. and Japan. A woman in her 20s told police that a foreigner raped her early Friday morning in the parking lot of a shopping mall in Chatan, not far from the Kadena base. Details of the alleged crime are sketchy, but for several hours police questioned...
...sound of a Ping-Pong ball suddenly shatters the quiet. I see nothing but can sense the ball moving left, then right, then back again (and again and again). My ears are performing the equivalent of the left-and-right neck pivot required to watch tennis. Finally the ball drops to the ground and rolls. Still in total darkness, I can sense which direction it's moving...
...after Bradley was duly buried, did Gore not do what candidates are all taught in Poli Sci 101 and pivot back to the center for the general election? Partly because his base was still wobbling; he kept stalling at about 80 percent of registered Democrats, even as Republicans were more than 90 percent stapled to Bush by summer. Gore, a free trader, had only 45 percent of union households in June; Ralph Nader was attracting enough lefties and anti-globalists and environmentalists to tip states like Wisconsin and Oregon into Bush's column. Gore's advisers argued that they would...