Word: welling
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...franchises to wage offensive war against the U.S. in places like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Yemen, which has vast tracts of lawless countryside, has been harboring - and nurturing - terrorists for years. It is the site of the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole that killed 17 U.S. sailors, as well as the stomping ground of Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical cleric and cyber-pen pal of Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood, Texas, shooter who killed 13 people in November. Abdulmutallab visited Yemen at least twice, most recently from August to December 2009, studying Arabic - and, apparently, bombmaking...
...Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), is a distinctly creative branch. In August a supposedly repentant member of AQAP drew close to Saudi Arabia's Deputy Interior Minister before detonating a bomb secreted in his anal cavity, according to Stratfor, a well-regarded private intelligence outfit based in Texas. Although the attacker died, his target was only slightly wounded. A Stratfor report issued five days later concluded, "The operation could have succeeded had it been better executed" - a judgment that sounds a great deal like the early verdict on Flight...
...because of the bravery of the people he was trying to murder. The one hopeful outcome of the saga is that, thanks to the swift action of passengers on Flight 253, Abdulmutallab was captured alive and is being held at a federal facility southwest of Detroit, where he may well prove to be a source of intelligence. It was an unexpected but valuable gift from those who moved quickly on an otherwise quiet Christmas morning...
...there is a great irony here: villagery is a trope more applicable to those making the accusation than to those being snarked upon. The left-wing blogosphere, at its worst, is a claustrophobic hamlet of the well educated, less interested in meaningful debate than the "village" it mocks. (At its best, it is a source of clever and well-informed anti-Establishment commentary.) Indeed, it resembles nothing so much as that other, more populous hamlet, the right-wing Fox News and Limbaugh slum. Hilariously, as we stagger from one awful decade into the next, there has been a coagulation...
...prejudices of the tea partiers, birthers, deathers, Palinites and other assorted "real" Americans are well known; the historic conservative opposition to universal health care isn't news. The dyspepsia of the left blogosphere is less easily explained, though. It has its roots in an issue the left got right and almost everyone else got wrong: the war in Iraq. There is still intense, unabated anger on the left because its opposition to the war was often ridiculed and almost always ignored in 2003. The anger at so-called moderates - actually, Democratic conservatives like Joe Lieberman - who supported...