Back in the newsroom, the joke went like this: "Is he dead yet?" There was always some miserable tyrant ready to go, but refused to do so. The obit was ready; he wasn't.
Saturday Night Live had it somewhat in reverse. Some may remember the "Franco is still dead" alert that was announced week after week.
How many U.S. presidents has Fidel Castro survived?
So, now it's Arafat. Is he dead yet? Word has it that he's suffering from this and that... but, not so fast! I know this from experience. Good things happen to bad people. Don't ask me why.
My money says Arafat hangs in. These guys always do. Listen, those generals placed a bomb right under Hitler's feet, and who paid? The generals. Hitler lived.
Some 20 years later, someone, from a distance, takes a shot at a moving vehicle, and down goes JFK.
Go ahead. Figure that one out.
I hate writers who quote themselves, but what the heck. Right after 9/11, two years ago, I bet my readers that Osama bin Laden would not be caught, dead or alive. I won that bet, and am still winning. My reasoning was based on what I just said about Hitler and JFK. Good people go; bad people stay. Beats me. ("Why Bin Laden Lives and JFK is Dead")
Right after we went into Iraq, I said the same thing about Saddam. Won't be caught. Again, I win. What makes me so smart?
I'm not smart. What I am is this ? I am a pessimist. We pessimists have it over you optimists by a mile. We are correct 98.6 percent of the time. Can't lose.
Want more pessimism? What should you do with one hundred billion American dollars? Toss it down the sewer or give it to Iraq? I go for the sewer. More value.
Optimists kill.
Here's the difference. A pessimist takes a hundred dollars to the casinos, and expects to lose. An optimist brings in 10,000 thugs from Tunis, gives them all rifles, and expects to win.
Strange are the ways of Providence. As Arafat goes on ticking, his contemporary, Sadat, is no more. Another "lucky" shot.
Assassins who aim at good guys seldom miss the bull?s-eye. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, to name just two more who were lost to us in their prime. Bloody dictators like Cambodia's Pol Pot and Uganda's Idi Amin, their days were long.
Somewhere, up there, is the answer. Down here, we just don't know. We're only human, and most of the time, life is all about questions and no answers.
A phony "rabbi" rants against Israel from San Francisco; a true rabbi is murdered in New York in 1990.
The Wall Street Journal's Danny Pearl was a fearless seeker of truth, and it cost him. He was abused horribly before they murdered him.
Practitioners of low journalism, they prosper. Make up your list. I've got my own, beginning with G.
While O.J. Simpson plays golf, John Lennon is still dead from another lucky hit. It's almost comical. Fidel lights up, and his spiked cigar fails to explode.
The Jerusalem Post and Moshe Feiglin, writing in Arutz Sheva, both advocate killing Arafat as a legitimate government initiative. But wasn't this already tried, if indirectly? Tanks surround his bunker, shells are lobbed in, and up pops the weasel, laughing. Only the people around him are splattered. (Hitler all over again, in more ways than one.) These bad guys ? we can't lose them even by accident.
Life doesn't imitate art. Life imitates cartoons.
My money says Arafat will have hatched a thousand new suicide bombers before he is reckoned with by those 72 virgins, all of whom surely duplicate his wife, Suha. (Is this their heaven?)
Of course, by the time you read this they may all be gone... Osama, Saddam and Yasser. Wanna bet?
Saturday Night Live had it somewhat in reverse. Some may remember the "Franco is still dead" alert that was announced week after week.
How many U.S. presidents has Fidel Castro survived?
So, now it's Arafat. Is he dead yet? Word has it that he's suffering from this and that... but, not so fast! I know this from experience. Good things happen to bad people. Don't ask me why.
My money says Arafat hangs in. These guys always do. Listen, those generals placed a bomb right under Hitler's feet, and who paid? The generals. Hitler lived.
Some 20 years later, someone, from a distance, takes a shot at a moving vehicle, and down goes JFK.
Go ahead. Figure that one out.
I hate writers who quote themselves, but what the heck. Right after 9/11, two years ago, I bet my readers that Osama bin Laden would not be caught, dead or alive. I won that bet, and am still winning. My reasoning was based on what I just said about Hitler and JFK. Good people go; bad people stay. Beats me. ("Why Bin Laden Lives and JFK is Dead")
Right after we went into Iraq, I said the same thing about Saddam. Won't be caught. Again, I win. What makes me so smart?
I'm not smart. What I am is this ? I am a pessimist. We pessimists have it over you optimists by a mile. We are correct 98.6 percent of the time. Can't lose.
Want more pessimism? What should you do with one hundred billion American dollars? Toss it down the sewer or give it to Iraq? I go for the sewer. More value.
Optimists kill.
Here's the difference. A pessimist takes a hundred dollars to the casinos, and expects to lose. An optimist brings in 10,000 thugs from Tunis, gives them all rifles, and expects to win.
Strange are the ways of Providence. As Arafat goes on ticking, his contemporary, Sadat, is no more. Another "lucky" shot.
Assassins who aim at good guys seldom miss the bull?s-eye. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, to name just two more who were lost to us in their prime. Bloody dictators like Cambodia's Pol Pot and Uganda's Idi Amin, their days were long.
Somewhere, up there, is the answer. Down here, we just don't know. We're only human, and most of the time, life is all about questions and no answers.
A phony "rabbi" rants against Israel from San Francisco; a true rabbi is murdered in New York in 1990.
The Wall Street Journal's Danny Pearl was a fearless seeker of truth, and it cost him. He was abused horribly before they murdered him.
Practitioners of low journalism, they prosper. Make up your list. I've got my own, beginning with G.
While O.J. Simpson plays golf, John Lennon is still dead from another lucky hit. It's almost comical. Fidel lights up, and his spiked cigar fails to explode.
The Jerusalem Post and Moshe Feiglin, writing in Arutz Sheva, both advocate killing Arafat as a legitimate government initiative. But wasn't this already tried, if indirectly? Tanks surround his bunker, shells are lobbed in, and up pops the weasel, laughing. Only the people around him are splattered. (Hitler all over again, in more ways than one.) These bad guys ? we can't lose them even by accident.
Life doesn't imitate art. Life imitates cartoons.
My money says Arafat will have hatched a thousand new suicide bombers before he is reckoned with by those 72 virgins, all of whom surely duplicate his wife, Suha. (Is this their heaven?)
Of course, by the time you read this they may all be gone... Osama, Saddam and Yasser. Wanna bet?