Word: screwup
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Kandahar screwup adds considerable pressure to Obama's decision about whether to double-down on a war he has called crucial to America's national security. The military wants a decision soon, but both the President and the Secretary of Defense are undecided - as they should be. Any decision about Afghanistan has to depend on whether the elections produce a plausible government - that is, one that includes Karzai's rivals, like Abdullah Abdullah and the excellent technocrat Ashraf Ghani, and removes from power allegedly corrupt elements, like Karzai's brother. And even then, the chance of success in Afghanistan...
...figure in the revival was the University of Chicago's Milton Friedman--and his libertarian ideological bent was certainly a factor. Friedman never believed markets were perfectly rational, but he thought they were more rational than governments. Friedman saw the Depression as the product of a Fed screwup--not a market disaster--and convinced himself and other economists (without much evidence) that speculators tended to stabilize markets rather than unbalance them...
...This election," Bill Clinton said in the hours before the Pennsylvania primary, "is too big to be small." It was a noble sentiment, succinctly stated, and the core of what Democrats believe - that George W. Bush has been a historic screwup as President, that there are huge issues to be confronted this year. But it was laughable as well. The Pennsylvania primary had been a six-week exercise in diminution, with both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama - and Bill Clinton too - losing altitude and esteem on an almost daily basis. Even as he spoke, the former President...
...poor at symbolizing ourselves. Many of us would like to snip the Union Jack off our flag, but no one can agree on a new design. Our official Olympic mascots and emblems are kitsch, climaxing last month in the Great Medal Screwup. It turned out that all the Olympic medals, the bronze and the silver as well as the gold, had been designed to feature not the Parthenon in Athens, not even the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, but the Colosseum in Rome, less noted for Olympic-style friendship than for gladiatorial butchery. What the hell, the officials...
...listening to phone calls. He did not help himself with a botched interview in which he failed to get his Shi'ites and Sunnis in the right terrorism groups. That slipup got lots of attention, including a lengthy article in the Washington Post. Reyes says the interview was a "screwup." His lack of guile and his ability to admit a mistake are evidence of good character. But his gaffe played into a racist assumption that stretches at least as far back as the 1970s, when California Congressman Ron Dellums, a black from Oakland with a long history of civil rights...