Opinion

In Arabic, "revolution" is a feminine noun. This is fitting, as without women revolutions are sterile. They have no movement, no life, no sound. Urdu, a distorter of tongues, pilfering as it does from Persian, Hindi, but largely Arabic, uses the masculine word for coup d'etat – inqilab – for revolution, rather than the accurate feminine: thawra. Perhaps that's why the Taliban were confused. Perhaps that's why they imagined that shooting a 15-year-old girl would somehow enhance their revolution.

This was a management not a technology failure. Obama's error was not to empower technologists to tell him the truth

It's instructive to remember that when the Tea Party first began to gather steam, the name referred to a "party" in the celebration sense – the Boston Tea Party, specifically: an event of planned chaos, a protest that masqueraded as an Indian attack. Over time, the name has lost its punny puckishness much as the movement has steadily shifted from a proudly anarchical – even populist – response and rebellion within the GOP to a smoothly functioning alternative to it. The government shutdown proved that attempts by the GOP establishment to co-opt the Tea Party as a source of energy just created a network of political sleeper agents. With its own mechanism for drafting (and supporting) candidates, its own agenda, and its own media eco-system, the Tea Party is a third party by almost any criteria but ballot affiliation – and leadership. The absence of any official organizational structure might be one reason the Tea Party has remained so lively despite a terrible national reputation and negligible policy achievements. When something goes wrong, those identified with the failure fade for a time and the attention of Tea Party-identified voters shifts smoothly to someone else. There's also no demand for positive policy victories or signature legislation: no one has to win a debate, just spoil the outcome. Thus it's no surprise that Ted Cruz is the current face of the Tea Party: All his achievements are proudly in the negative, all his goals are set resolutely in the past. But the Tea Party's fickle and hive-like nature virtually demands that Cruz cycle out of the spotlight eventually. He will either fail to stop something from happening or, perhaps worse, accidentally cause something to get done. For when that happens: here's a look at some of the Tea Party's once and perhaps future leaders. The don't-call-them comebacks: politicians and activists who've tasted Tea Party's adoration and haven't given up on a second sip. These are primarily hacks who clawed their way on stage at some point and are now biding their time in minor-media purgatory with the hope that they'll be able to fake-controversy themselves into relevance once more. Herman Cain: the one-time front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination sputtered into the national conversation just this week, asserting the accusations of sexual harassment that sealed the end of his campaign were the work of "a force bigger than right": the Devil. He is an aggressive and peppy Twitter user and turns up on Fox Business to predict disaster on a regular basis.