Guaranteed that Tony wouldn't have screwed things up so badly.


After giving it considerable thought, I think that Tony Soprano was the classier act.

He knew how to go out: Fade to black.



This panjandrum of pettiness; this maker of muck, prefers to hang on to drain every last profitable opportunity from what he had called more than a thousand days ago, a Victory, and has turned into the most foul smelling of America’s enterprises that anyone can remember.



Yet the loyal, whom I’m convinced are either suffering mental disorientation or are locked into the world of Alice believe that we must fight them over there or lose over here as if one thing had anything to do with the other.



Bush has done his best to connect Al Qaeda in Iraq with the real Jihadists in Pakistan

There is no connection. The planning and the execution came directly from bin Laden’s forces in Afghanistan.



Bush talks to the rest of us as if we were fools.



Tony Soprano would never do that. And instead of trying to forge a non-existant justification that would result in senseless killing of his troops, he would have negotiated a settlement by now.



But Bush’s star negotiators are no negotiators at all. Their trick, worthy of a Catch 22, suggests that if we need to talk to them, we don’t; and we talk to them if we don’t need to, which is the same kind of logic that would not even daunt Major Major but would cause any logical thinker to pull his hair out by the roots.



IN fact, when it comes to Iraq, the goal posts are always moving.



Originally, if you recall after we decided that WMD did not resonate with too many people when they couldn’t even find a bottle of peroxide or a Chinese fire cracker, they changed their tune.



At one point, we even harped on the notion of bringing democracy to Iraq as if any Iraqi cared beyond getting the water to work and having air conditioning at night.



But we couldn’t even do that.



We then settled for getting the government to work. That was before it was revealed in snippets that most of those elected couldn’t even stand each other and that’s why nothing worked.



We were caught up short, immersed in the idea that if you didn’t want democracy, there was something wrong with you…



When we also learned that holding elections has nothing to do with fair government,

The government was already so perplexed that it stood twiddling its thumbs.



Poor Petraeus, there is so much heat on the main that I’m surprised he is still standing.



If things shouldn’t go as anticipated in September, we suspect that General Petraeus may change his name and move to another country.



By then, the government should be back from its well earned vacation and our army ready to chuck the whole thing up as something conceived by a madman and managed by a Whitehouse full of imbeciles.



No, if Tony were responsible, it would have been all settled by now and we would have our vig on the 500 billion we invested. Plus, somehow, Tony’s wife would have gotten a fur coat out of the deal.



Such is life when life imitates bad art or when art tries to imitate bad art.



Les Aaron

The Armchair Curmudgeon


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