Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer drew a curious comparison on Fox News Thursday evening between Washington's fiscal cliff standoff and the Civil War.
Last August, he and a group of civil-rights activists had a standoff in Hillsborough against several hundred Confederate flag supporters, who had arrived in town to protest the removal of Confederate symbols from public spaces.
Near-civil war in Iraq, a standoff with Iran, Arab-Israeli tensions, strife in Nigeria, anti-American nationalism in Venezuela: Rarely have so many volatile events converged.
The lingering specter of the long civil war is reinforced by a standoff between pro-government and opposition parties, and by continued fighting between the Lebanese Army and Islamists in the north.
But the departing advisers have formed the nucleus of Mr. Ashcroft's operation and have been among his biggest defenders in his increasingly tense standoffs with Congress over civil liberties concerns surrounding the Patriot Act and other issues.
Near-civil war in Iraq, a dangerous standoff with Iran, Arab- Israeli tensions, ethnic and religious strife in Nigeria, anti-American nationalism in Venezuela: Rarely have so many volatile events converged.
For a moment, the activists — schoolteachers, civil servants, the unemployed — remained in a standoff with the police there, a force of some sixty officers.
The settlement with the Justice Department ended the last civil suit arising from the 11-day standoff in 1992 at the Idaho compound of Randall C. Weaver, a white separatist.
Unlike what you'll hear from neoconservative "experts --who want to bring frexperts --whoIranian pexperts --who they have to kill every last one of them--the current standoff has choked off Iranian civil society.
And then came the showdown that would re-ignite the civil rights movement, pushing Dr.King into a standoff with President Kennedy and his brother, the U.S. Attorney General, and making the March on Washington not only possible but necessary: Birmingham.
