Word: symbolics
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...wearing a stars and stripes onesie, the flag lapel pin is the quickest sartorial method for a politician to telegraph his or her patriotism. The origin of the flag lapel pin is murky, though it is by necessity linked the history of the American flag as a commonly used symbol. According to Marc Leepson's Flag: An American Biography, the "near religious reverence many Americans have" for our national symbol dates only to the Civil War era (not back to the Revolutionary War, as many assume) . Prior to that, few private citizens possessed or flew their own flags...
...point of defeat. But they still held potent cards: one was the hundreds of millions of dollars they make each year via drug trafficking; the other was their more than 700 army, police and civilian hostages. And no captives were as valuable - or as much a symbol of their continued leverage - as Betancourt and the three Americans: Keith Stansell, Thomas Howes and Marc Gonsalves. "The FARC will never be able to recover from this," says Alfredo Rangel, a military analyst and head of the Security and Democracy Foundation in Bogot...
...Afghanistan, "the place where the challenges that used to be nationwide have been swept like dead leaves into a pile." And at the top of that heap is Kajaki, where the struggle to secure and repair one of the nation's most important infrastructure projects has become a symbol of the wider effort to rebuild Afghanistan...
...fellow citizen lacks it. Obama's original mistake was not in declining to wear the flag pin but in saying he had stopped wearing it because he saw "people wearing a lapel pin but not acting very patriotic." And that's what makes his current adoption of the symbol so shrewd. By opposing the Iraq war in the fevered year after 9/11--when some Bush supporters branded doves unpatriotic--he has already expressed an understanding of patriotism particularly beloved by liberals: patriotism as lonely dissent. Now he is expressing an understanding particularly important to the conservatives he must court: patriotism...
...provided the plutonium for the 8 to 16 nuclear bombs U.S. intelligence agencies now believe North Korea has - including the nuke it tested in October of 2007. On Friday, June 27, Pyongyang says it will blow up the cooling tower of the nuclear facility at Yongbyan - the most visible symbol of North Korea's nuclear program...