Word: wing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...security personnel could not: stop a terrorist trying to detonate a bomb on a plane on the quietest morning of the year. Just as the cabin crew strapped in for landing, an explosion - it sounded like a firecracker - came from the left side of the fuselage just over the wing. Alain Ghonda - a 38-year-old, Silver Spring, Md., real estate consultant, who was sitting in seat 18H - immediately stood up, in defiance of the seat-belt sign, and looked to his left. Ghonda remained upright another minute and soon saw thick, dark gray smoke coming from...
...snarkier precincts of the left-wing blogosphere, mainstream journalists like me are often called villagers. The reference, so far as I can tell, has to do with isolation: we live in this little village on the Potomac - actually, I don't, but no matter - constantly intermingling over hors d'oeuvres, deciding who is "serious" (a term of derision in the blogosphere) and who is not, regurgitating spin spoon-fed by our sources or conjuring a witless conventional wisdom that has nothing to do with reality as it is lived outside the village. There is, of course, some truth to this...
...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...
...denizens of the left blogosphere consider themselves the Democratic Party's base. But they are not. For Democrats, as opposed to Republicans, the wing is not the base; the legions of loyal African Americans, union members, Jews, women and Latinos are. In the end, the sillier left-village practitioners are stoking the same populist exaggeration - the idea that Washington is controlled by crooks and sellouts - that conservative strategists like Bill Kristol believe will bring the Republicans back to power. The perversity of this is beyond comprehension...
...fine job portraying Lula from young man to adult, but the film glosses over Lula's frailties, depicting him as a man who can do no wrong. "The director omitted episodes in Lula's life that suggest the President has weaknesses or defects," said Veja, a popular right-wing newsmagazine. "Basically, it's a terrible film," wrote critic Ricardo Calil...