In that sense, while his motives might be parochial, Karim is also fighting for you and me.
"You couldn't imagine high school games with more on the line; they weren't just fighting for parochial titles or New Jersey titles, they were fighting for national prominence," he said.
The PAC gushed over Mr. Flake during his Senate run last year, and its chairman, Jim DeMint, a former Republican senator, endorsed him: "When it comes to fighting wasteful spending and parochial politics, nobody has done more to advance the cause of freedom than Jeff Flake.
That means putting aside parochial politics and embracing the global challenge of fighting climate change.
If Hezbollah's alliance had emerged victorious, it would have represented another step in the evolution of a once parochial Shiite militia that started as a guerrilla force fighting Israeli occupation of the south into a national institution that slowly has defined the identity of the state.
Team members are fighting for resources or authority to advance their parochial interests.
And many of the efforts to combat government endorsement of religion in schools were basically anti-Catholic in nature — fighting the expenditure of any state money on parochial schools, that sort of thing.
During his three-year-tenure, Cardinal George reorganized parochial school finances in Chicago, played a major role in fighting Illinois legislation that would have legalized same-sex civil unions and appeared often in Springfield, the state capital, to lobby for and against various bills, said Robert Gilligan, executive director of the Illinois Conference of Catholic Bishops.
In September, Mr. Sharon's argument that the United States and Israel were fighting the same war was rejected by administration officials as a parochial diversion in the face of an American tragedy that required a unified mobilization to attack Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda in as many as 60 countries.
"Being an Irish writer both hampers and helps me," he once said, "hampers, because one is fighting the preconceptions of audiences who have been conditioned to expect feyness and parochial subject matter; helps, because the writer can utilise a vigorous and poetic idiom which enables him to combine subtlety with richness".
