Yesterday, I stayed late watching the speech of Abu Mazen. I must confess that I found him a more skillful puppet, and more slimy and lying politician, than I had thought. He reminded me, in his acting performance during the speech, of Anwar Sadat. He would (pretend to) cry one minute, and then laugh heartily in another minute, and would use folksy expressions to make himself appear "one of the people". Embezzlers of millions are not "one of the people." But it was such an acting performance; his acting performance was as sincere as when Bill Clinton chokes up in public. And the previous night, I watched Tariq `Aziz pathetically defending himself and his former boss, Saddam Husayn. It was quite a scene. This former "ideologue" of the Ba`th Party is so incompetent and so ineffective. And this was supposed to be the "sophisticated" foreign policy brain of the regime. A potato would have done better. You can only imagine Saddam and his cronies during their rule.