The Penalty.
The higher minimum wage levied as a punishment to Wal-Mart and other big stores can only be seen as an unconscionably reactionary act…one which had the support of the penny-ante careerists in the City Council. Their eyes have a common optical property: they can see their own aggrandizement and have no interest whatever in the real poor who will be deprived—just their own fat wallets. For once this Blog feels sorry for Mayor Daley who knows the penalties that will be exacted on his city. Organized labor which has taken over political campaigns and funding has become the giant boss in the city and is running a machine that becomes the new 12-cylinder, air-cooled, four-wheel brake model. The two papers did all they could do but there is no stopping a special interest when it seizes power or weak-character councilmen who smell the meat a-cookin’.
Publisher’s Wife.
Jennifer Hunter who does a column under that name but who is the wife of the Sun-Times publisher John Cruikshank, talks a good game about being an ex-magazine editor but still gets her clout at the paper the old-fashioned way by being married to the boss. Anyhow, she wrote yesterday that she wonders how Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice can be a Republican when she is (a) smart, (b) a child of the South where blacks were discriminated against. That is only the latest vacuous contribution the ultra-feminist pro-abort has made to intellectual discussion. Rather than answer it, one has to examine the blatant arrogance of the column which says she cannot understand how somebody as smart as Rice is not just like Jennifer Hunter and a passionate Democrat. It ranks right up there with some other egregiously liberal but undocumented and prejudicial contributions to the newspaper her husband runs as the Democratic newspaper of record. Baldly it asks: what right has Rice not to agree with me? Blacks are supposed to be liberal and Democratic. How dare she be different from my preconception of African Americans!
Being so partisan a Democrat fits the wife of the publisher of the Sun-Times. And running a Democratic newspaper of record is o.k., in fact salutary to a newspaper that purports to be “objective” when it is not, ever so slyly as long as the news is thoroughly interpretative and the editorials, columns and Op Eds crisp and challenging. But commentaries like Hunter’s should contain a grain of rationality. Ignorant, a giveaway of mal-education, it ranks with the immortal statement made by New York state Democratic chairman Paul Fitzpatrick who said in 1950 that Dwight Eisenhower had to be a Democrat because “a man of his convictions cannot be a Republican.” We all know how that one came out. Eisenhower became one of the most effective Republican presidents of the 20th century. Rice is not going to run for president but she is a Republican, is the most stunning symbol of the new age of independence for African Americans where they are not chattel of a single party. She will be regarded as one of the more intelligent and dexterous secretaries of state in history. And she got there the old-fashioned way, through ambition and intellect, Ms. Hunter.
Marin.
This Blog sees less and less value in the kind of personal perpendicular pronoun “I-I-I” commentary that Carol Marin does in the Sun-Times. It believes it will shortly take the vow of not commenting about her as she comes from the intellectual level where there is no analysis served up but conformity to liberal ideology is the highest of goods. What she has to say is simply what any slightly trained pro-Marxist circa 1917 would bleat so it is entirely without merit. Let this Blog make a vow not to mention her or her wafer-thin columns again. If it violates that trust, you are empowered to write and hurl down the imprecations of Zeus.
Trivia Answer.
Everybody tried real hard, particularly Frank Nofsinger out there in Connecticut. And he came pretty close: Al Smith or Fiorello LaGuardia. Very close, Frank—but not quite. The answer is that the speaker at the ship christening was the former song-and-dance man turned New York Mayor, Jimmy Walker, the predecessor to LaGuardia…the man who popularized the song “Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?” Not exactly a big number now, understand. Thanks for trying. I’ll serve up an easier one soon.
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