There are a couple of columnists regularly featured in Long Island's only daily newspaper who appear to have discovered their niche in newspapering - trashing Nassau's new county executive, Tom Suozzi, before he ever gets started. These guys are like a pair of Pat Buchanan rejects who were tossed out of the campaign for being too mean-spirited.

Without mentioning names, let's call them Moe and Curly. But you can call them Matthew Carolan and Raymond J. Keating if that suits you better.

In any event, these two stooges have apparently decided that they're going to make their living for the next four years cutting our new county executive exactly no slack, none at all. The only problem is that Moe and Curly here are bashing the entire citizenry of Nassau County in order to make their points.

Two weeks ago, Moe and Curly commented on Tom Suozzi's inauguration speech, berating the whole community with their conclusion that Mr. Suozzi's call for "energy, optimism and success" - what he says is our task to bring a new spirit to all levels of county government - is nothing more than the cynical rantings of a self-indulgent politician who has no greater incentive in his new job than, "to amass more power, more patronage and bigger budgets," all in the name of his own self-interest. They claimed that essentially, we voters are disinterested in our own government and care only that government should, "arrest the bad guys, fill potholes, clear away the snow and keep taxes low." They imply that as long as our government accomplishes those tasks, the rest of us will be a bunch of happy fools.

With all due respect to these three stooges minus one, I think there are more than a few folks who do buy into the Suozzi notion that public service can be a noble endeavor, that it can be something more than the kind of self-interest displayed by the likes of Carolan and Keating who, after all, are being paid the big bucks to do nothing more productive than trash productivity in the name of journalistic opinion.

As a taxpaying resident of this great county, I take immense offense at the musings of a couple of stooges who state that, "government cannot be saved, as people are saved, because the effects of original sin permanently taint it. And no amount of brilliant thinking by Suozzi's 'best and brightest' can change that." You'd swear that with this kind of fundamentalist approach to political analysis, these guys ought to be the lead columnists for the Taliban Times.

I submit that if the best analysis they can produce on the likely success of our new county government is that it has no chance of success because it is systemically flawed and beyond repair, after Mr. Suozzi has been in office for a less than an hour, then they are as brain dead as the last crowd who nearly ran our government into the ground taking care of themselves and their friends, leaving the new county executive to clean up the mess.

Maybe Moe and Curly would do better if they gave Larry a shot at writing their column.

Michael A. Levy