enemy of my eneny

I don't remember Fish Police as a tv show.  I remember the character Fish on the Barney Miller police show.  I don't generally favor animation, but having said that I am a big fan of The Simpsons and South Park, when it isn't featuring that awful Mr Hankey.

Old Dog has gone positively Mayberry with his depiction of the cane pole and the can of red wrigglers, I'll wager he tossed those awful city shoes aside and was trailing his toes in the wake of the little boat with the putt putt motor.  Well the putt putt motor is my idea, maybe it was a rowboat.  Rowboats are nice.  One summer the family rented a cabin somewhere up in Michigan and there was a rowboat and you couldn't keep me out of it.  There was fishing too, some suicidal blue gills I think, who you just put on a bit of bologna or it might have been a safety pin and before the bologna got wet you had a fish on the end, sometimes you didn't even need the bologna.  Great fun, but then when I saw my grandfather sitting at a table of dead fish cleaning them, I kind of lost interest.

I believe I previously pointed out the downside of the enemy of my enemy is my friend in that once the enemy is beaten down, the enemy of that enemy is stronger so now he becomes my enemy and my former enemy, who is the enemy of my former friend now becomes my friend.  It sounds kind of middle eastern to me but wiki tells me that the first mention of it  they can find is in Sanskrit around 400 BC. 

The first time I remember hearing the phrase was sometime before the Iranian revolution when Iran and Iraq had some border dispute.  Naturally there were Kurds in the region and I believe Iraq was arming the Kurds who were in rebellion against Iran, although it could have been the other way around.  Proud people those Kurds.  This is where I first learned that their army was called the Peshmerga which in Kurdish meant We who are about to die.  Tough and proud people those Kurds.. Anyway somewhere along the line Iraq and Iran came to an agreement, and the one side stopped arming the Kurds and the other side swept in and the Peshmerga did indeed become those who were about to die.

They are playing a similar role in the mideast today, being the enemy of whoever's enemy and therefore the friend of whoever and meanwhile piling up real estate, until they become the enemy.

It has been ever so.  Before the Crusades the middle east was full of warring states (like the northern Italy of The Prince), making and breaking alliances between each other.  Then along came the Crusaders who didn't play by the rules.  United under their faith, they presented a united front and wham bam took Palestine and the Holy Land,  But after a hundred or so years of reclining on their divans eating dates and reading poetry the culture of the mideast took them over and they started to play by the local rule of the enemy of my enemy and sometimes they fought with Arabs against fellow Christians,and eventually Saladin united the Arabs under their faith and blew the Europeans out of the middle east.

If we consider friends positive and enemies negative, we see that the enemy of my enemy, (-1)X(-1), becomes +1, a friend.  Whereas the friend of my friend, (+1)X(+1), becomes +1,a friend, rather than -1, an enemy.

Mike Royko was indeed an asshole, and he drank a lot.  Nobody is perfect.