Word: plunger
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...Louima's story horrified the nation and rocked many New Yorkers' faith in their police force: In August 1997, Louima spent a brutal summer night in the bathroom of a Brooklyn police station, being sodomized with the handle of a toilet plunger...
Bobby Kennedy--out of self-absorption, recklessness, fear of cowardice, idealism or sheer nervous energy--was a headlong plunger all his life. Toward the end of it, in June 1967, on a rafting trip down cold rapids in the Grand Canyon, Kennedy defied the river guides, who thought it was too dangerous, and threw himself into the white water to tumble wildly down through a slalom of rocks. He did this kind of thing all the time. What was he trying to prove...
...Bobby--the saint and the bully--but all the Bobbys, like cats in a bag: the punk with the resourceful instincts of a statesman (see the Cuban missile crisis or the civil rights struggle in the South), the hawk and the dove, the liberal and the conservative, the plunger and the temporizer, the youthful McCarthyite, the knight of the New Age, the scowlingly obsessive hater (Castro, Hoffa) who was also a friend of animals, children and poets...
...matter how hideous the episode, he does no favor for the 99% of cops who don't shoot first and ask questions later. Giuliani does know how to behave better. When Haitian immigrant Abner Louima was sodomized by a police officer with the handle of a toilet plunger in 1997, Giuliani expressed shock at the brutality and called for a task force to review police-community issues. But that was in the midst of his re-election campaign, and since then his reaction to charges of police brutality has grown more strident. The irony is that police killings of civilians...
...flow they had employed before. Soon, as Americans moved into spanking-new homes or replaced their cracked old gurglers with the swishy new models, they found themselves forced to flush and flush again--drowning the supposed benefits of water conservation. And then they had to go hunting for the plunger. Soon they wanted the thunderous whoosh of their old, high-flow toilets back...