The New York Times did another huge takeout on the shambles left by the AOL Time Warner deal over the weekend and Ted Turner has been letting it all hang out on "60 Minutes II." Now that the esteemed CEO Dick Parsons is the last man standing, business journalists are going to miss covering the antics of the gang of four who created all this mayhem. Abrasive Steve Case. Machiavellian Gerry Levin. Flash Bob Pittman. Motor-mouthed Ted. Forget the finances, forget the game plan; these personalities were never going to share anything. How could Case, the die-hard Republican with the Pizza Hut sensibility, ever fuse his company with the Time Warner culture of bicoastal country club liberalism?

Mergers are fraught with what corporate lawyers like to refer to as "the social issues." Ted Turner, for instance, still smarts from the slights at the time of the first merger in 1996 between Time Warner and Turner Broadcasting. In the press, Levin had done a lot of talking about how he and Ted were "partners" and even "best friends," yet Levin had never invited Turner to his house for dinner.

It might seem surprising that Turner, a craggy giant of a man who is the largest land holder in the United States after the federal government, would care if small, ferrety Gerry asked him 'round for dinner. But Ted did care. He felt dissed. He used to honk away about it like a frog on a lily pad.

Perhaps the very concept of a "merger" is a business myth that inevitably leads to feelings of disappointment and betrayal. It might be healthier to talk about conquest. In order to be functional, one company has to chew up and swallow the other. Then a new dictator has to be found to run it. "Merger" is just a euphemistic weasel-word like "compassionate conservatism." Time AOL was a corporate war where everybody lost.

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