Tag: Israel

Taking care of business

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
“What, you think I’m some sort of putz like that Trump character?”

Well. Seems the Israelis went and stole some of the pomp and circumstance from Der Trumpenführer’s little parade.

Saturday’s expensive, theatrical pud-pulling in DeeCee will soon be forgotten, even by fanboys, late-show wiseguys, and meme-makers. But people will be talking about what Israel just did to Iran for the better part of quite some time.

Discussing the differences between preemptive strikes and preventative war in The Atlantic, Tom Nichols likened the Israeli decapitation of the Iranian military’s chain of command to Michael Corleone’s settling of the family business near the end of “The Godfather.”

But Trump is straight out of Jimmy Breslin’s “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.” A guy who, like Kid Sally Palumbo, couldn’t even promote a bicycle race worth a damn.

Remember the Tour de Trump? Yeah, neither does anyone else. That little Tour de France thing he promised to topple is still ticking along nicely, though.

He kept his big bazoo shut for hours after the Israeli strikes on Iran — yeah, I know, Fatso keeping it buttoned sounds like fake news to me, too — and when he finally got medicated enough to fart out a few syllables they were all about “deals,” as if the existential Israeli-Iranian saber dance on the razor’s edge of Armageddon were just another real-estate pitch.

You want a bomb shelter with that casino? There will be a small additional charge.

In the beginning was the Word

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
“See this word here? It’s not pronounced the way you might think. Cecil B. DeMille got it right in ‘The Ten Commandments.'”

When I awakened this morning not as a fleeting puff of radioactive gas but as Your Humble Narrator, I knew it was gonna be a good day.

Jesus H., etc. The Middle East has been figuring in my nightmares since, well, forever.

When I was a smaller, humbler narrator my parents taught me to read phonetically, aloud, using whatever printed material was handy. Stumbling through a report in Time magazine one day I encountered the incomprehensible “Egypt,” and after rolling it around in the gem polisher of my mind for a spell I decided it must be pronounced “Iggy-pit.”

My parents roared. I never heard the end of it. They told it to their pals over martinis. They told it to my pals, who had to endure it stone-cold sober and punished me for it afterward. They told it to my dates, who otherwise might have become actual girlfriends, which may help explain why it took so long for me to find someone to marry.

I’ve been deeply suspicious about home-schooling ever since. Later, I would come to question faith-based titles to real estate.