Reader Stephen Coquet is not the first to point this out:
After the first shock, when we were all one, when the whole free world was one with us, I was optimistic. I thought we might have as much as three weeks before politicians started making political hay out of it. We didn't even get three days. Soon GWB was beating the war drums for war with Iraq, even though the attack came from nineteen Saudis, many with close ties to the Saudi royal family. But we went to war with Iraq. Because, are you really going to do that to people who have dined at your table, and whose tables you have dined at? And all that oil!
Which made me want to slightly modify a quote by Upton Sinclair:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his (oil) depends on his not understanding it.”
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Somehow this reminded me of my favorite journalist quote (outside of H.L. Menken, who penned all the really good ones). Anyway, my good friend Dan Berger is a wine columnist who used to review wines for the L.A. Times. He's among the smartest in the game, and his columns aren't the usual drivel describing French oak and cassis, blah, blah, blah. His screeds are philosophical, such as ranting about the decline of great Napa Cabernet or, say, the mixed bag on offer from the Natural Wine movement. I lunch with Dan every week and we wax philosophical over a dozen wines or so. One day while we were debating some abstruce point, he blurted out, "I would agree with everything you have saide except that then I would have no story."