TB as usual you raise an exceptionally interesting point. To this day presidents have men killed: to wit: Osama bin Laden and all the drone strikes. In addition. there are very few politicians who leave office with less money than they had when they came in, and the means by which most of them acquire wealth is sketchy to say the least. In that regard, therefore, what Michael said to Kay still stands. She was the naive one.
What Michael never got was the concept of nuance. Like in baseball, in the law there the written rules and the "unwritten rules." People who bend legal and ethical matters within the "unwritten rules" can get away with it whereas people who don't suffer the consequences. For example, Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida has never spent one day in his adult life in anything but public office, yet he has amassed great wealth as th result of being a "consultant" to various corporations, and the like, and no one bats an eye cause everyone does it. Jesse Jackson Jr., on the other hand, just lifted campaign funds from the till and used the money on himself.
I use this example to illustrate the point that Vito and Tom Hagen knew how to operate within the "unwritten rules" and escape the problems Michael encountered. Vito would never have done something like order the death of Hyman Roth or a mamber of his own family, nor would he have ever done such an "in your face" thing to a United States Senator in front of witnesses.
Vito killed when it was good business, and then he did not brag about it...people just "knew." Fanucci comes to mind. Michael handled Geary at the brother the way Vito would have...privately and with only Geary knowing in whose debt he was.
Michael on the other hand did not understand when to retreat. He was always on the attack. Always paranoid. Always wanting to kill people. For Vito, doing something like killing a producer's prized horse was enough to get what he wanted. Michael was not that clever.
To draw the baseball analogy to a logical conclusion, if Michael were a pitcher, and the "unwritten rules" called for him to hit a batter with a pitch, he would not go for the thigh, he'd go for the head, and then consider the umpire who threw him out of the game to be another "enemy" with whom to be dealt.
