Chalabi is seen as a sort of hero of the mission in Iraq.

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Largely forgotten for decades in the shadows of inventors like Thomas Edison, Tesla has emerged in recent years as a sort of unsung hero among the science-minded.

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The three-year criminal investigation that followed made Zimmermann a sort of cypherpunk folk hero for privacy advocates, though he was never formally prosecuted.

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If they made the unfortunate decision to do something differently, we did not want -- we wanted at all costs to avoid the pain that would obviously be caused by a celebration or some sort of welcome befitting a hero, not a terrorist and a murderer, in Libya.

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Unsurprisingly, this has made him a sort of ivory-tower folk-hero of the American left a thinking person's Michael Moore.

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Glenn Beck likes to style himself a sort of latter-day Revolutionary War hero, rallying the forces of freedom to rise up against oppression.

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Taking that sort of abuse from a hero would be too much for some people to take, but Gurwitch used it as a springboard to a new comedic niche.

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That sort of staged launch is "not too uncommon for a non-hero device, " Mr. Heiner said.

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It holds strong to the idea that an empathetic and less than winning hero is the best sort of character for a comedy.

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