Personal Asides: That Despicable Sunday “Sun-Times” Front Page…What My Political Gut Tells Me

Despicable Front Page.

You got up last Sunday morning and opened the “Sun-Times” to see what the latest news was that occurred since you went to bed Saturday night. And what is it? It’s wife-swapping with a huge picture of a buxom blonde with two guys, one with her first husband who asked her to participate in a sexually liberating round robin and one with her current husband who obliged…all described in salacious detail. Isn’t that nice for kids like my grandchildren and your children to be confronted with? I wonder how Michael Cooke, the editor who is responsible for this garbage, can face himself having put out that obscene broadside. Or does that story cause him to pant and wipe his brow with clammy anticipation?

Or how John Cruickshank, the publisher, who savors the reputation as a good guy, enjoys being associated with his good buddy Cooke who regurgitates this; or how John Barron, by all odds a decent guy…the brother of a good priest…likes to see his name associated with this. When it all comes to an end someday, is that what you want to be remembered for? Do you think purveying filth has no spiritual consequences for children who are debased and your own souls?

Not only the excrement all over the front page, but the dumbing down of the newspaper. They are trying to write for illiterates and are succeeding. Goethe described as a street that was named after “some old poet.” But the unutterable filth that Cooke spews is the worst.

Michael Sneed, a good columnist, clever and occasionally prescient, , are the big bucks this scatological paper that belongs on rolls in a lavatory…are the big bucks you receive so important to you…having earned them for a good number of years…that you still want to be associated with a paper that debases the public taste and scandalizes the young? Is that what you built up your reputation for? You who are so concerned with the slaughtering of horses; aren’t you concerned with the poisoning of the young? Don’t you have any concern about the scandalizing of children…which you are a part of since you cause this rag to hold on to a lot of the circulation it has? Are you able to turn your back on prurience and soft-porn masquerading as news? Do you think you have any responsibility to the young who were jaded by this garbage savored by your boss, Michael Cooke…the Michael Cooke you term as “ageless”?

Or are you just interested in seeing that the newspaper survives no matter what pornography it has to employ to do it. Is it worth it, Mike Sneed? Hmmm? Or Fran Spielman, one of the best city hall reporters any paper ever had…is this job so major to you…as a wife and mother…that you have to share your inestimably good product with the contents that should be distributed in back alleys by sick old men in long overcoats? Do you feel good about where you work?

To paraphrase someone else at another time…has anyone mounted the courage to say to Cooke: oh sir, have you no decency at last?

Gut.

What my gut tells me is four things. First, eventually this country is going to be hit with a terrorist attack. Authorities can ferret out these sickos only so long. And second, when the attack comes…whether, God forbid, it’s major or as can be hoped it’s minor…and if say it is repeated…the election will be over and Giuliani will be nominated—maybe elected—with the same kind of desperation that this country had when it turned to Roosevelt during the Depression. Is he my first choice? No, nor second nor third. But I sense that with the chance of a Republican president at only 35% , only circumstances like the above can turn it around.

And third…the long-long wait for Fred Thompson. Will it be like the climactic scene in Charlle Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator”? The Germans haul up on a railroad car a super-long cannon with a barrel that protrudes a half-block. Forty men straining pull a wagon up on which a projectile is chained. They unfasten the projectile and joined by fifty other men strain and sweat…lifting the projectile up to the mouth of the cannon…all the while a little man in the engine room of the cannon turns a dial and the projectile skids down the long tube of the barrel. Everybody holds their ears. The little man in the engine room presses a button; the cannon rears itself up and for a second the entire earth trembles…only for the cannon to go “pop” and the projectile drops on the ground.

The question is: is the long wait for Fred Thompson going to react like this…a dud? The long-long wait leads me to wonder if that isn’t what’s going to happen.

And fourth, with the Democrats fighting against “intrusion of civil liberties” and “turning Gitmo into a torture camp”…will they sound as impressive when and if there is a terrorist attack…and the American people ask: who tried to hold back our self-defense and who stands for using every instance available to protect us?

But whether this is correct or not…mark as a truism that there will be either an attempted attack or an attack…and that depending on the vibrations it makes…the primary season for Republicans may be over before it begins…with the inevitability of Giuliani. For let one more attack occur, or an attempted attack…and we won’t be talking about the other issues…the economy, tax cuts for the wealthy. We’ll be talking about survival and who is best equipped to lead us into battle.

If that happens, it ain’t going to be Hillary or Barack or Edwards or Richardson…or Romney or McCain or even Thompson…it’ll be Rudy. I don’t say I’m for him…I just say I have that feeling in my gut.