Word: taboo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...allegiances and ambitions. That worked fine when it was up against Howard Dean's homespun Vermont militia. Against Bush-Cheney '04, a disciplined hierarchy run by Karl Rove and manned by fervent Bush loyalists who take no prisoners, it could be a recipe for a landslide. Second-guessing is taboo under Rove, chiefly because Bush trusts him completely. But it's more like a privilege of membership at Kerry HQ, with the candidate himself often joining the debate. "Their candidate knows what he thinks," said a Democratic Party elder. "Ours feels no compunction to talk about all sides...
...pity?" asked the daily Die Welt. So far, the response in Germany seems to be yes. A Stern magazine poll taken before the film's release found that 69% of those surveyed felt it was acceptable to show Hitler's human side, while 26% said it wasn't. "The taboo has been broken," says Rolf Giesen, the curator of the Film Museum in Berlin, who is troubled by the film. "To show Hitler as a benevolent old man and not mention the Holocaust or the millions of people who became victims of the war - this is a real danger." Downfall...
...most previous Japanese Olympians, the lure of success?or, rather, the possibility of failure?has kept them locked in a Confucian pressure cooker, in which disappointing the country is the ultimate taboo. The national burden has been blamed for several high-profile Olympic chokes in previous Games, most recently Tsukahara's meltdown in Sydney, when he plunged off the pommel horse and ruined his chances of a medal in the individual all-round event. "I'm very sorry," he said, in a common refrain from Japanese Olympians. "I wish I hadn't disgraced my nation." Four years later, Tsukahara...
...Qaeda's foray into drugs dates from the days when the Taliban ruled the country. Though most devout Muslims consider narcotics taboo, bin Laden never directly condemned drug sales. A Western antinarcotics official says that in early 2001 al-Qaeda's financial experts joined forces with Khan and other alleged top Afghan drug traffickers to persuade Taliban leader Omar to ban opium cultivation. The ban was self-serving: it drove up opium prices from $30 per kilogram to nearly $650. That meant huge profits for the Taliban and their trafficker friends who were sitting on large stockpiles when prices soared...
Jimmy Carter’s Nobel lets him say whatever he wants. (And saying Bush misled the American people—wow, that’s pretty hot stuff. Kudos to the convention’s planners for managing to make even so simple a factual criticism as this taboo for anyone but a former president...