Personal Asides: Messages to Two Correspondents to this Site…Political Shootout Team for Sunday: Joe Moore and John Curry…The “Tribune’s” Love Letter to Obama.

Two Correspondents.

First to the man or woman who signs in as “Lovie’s Leather”: Your comments are good but I must say your choice of a name is weird. What, exactly, is meant by “Lovie’s Leather”? It sounds like a dominatrix with a coiled whip and spurs who stalks in skin-tight pantaloons under a purple light. Would you care to enlighten us on just how you came upon that name? If you won’t or can’t, consider moving on.

The second is more severe—to the weirdo who writes vaguely illiterate stuff under the name of somebody’s (I’m not giving out the name) left buttock. I don’t appreciate it and I don’t appreciate you. Please don’t write anymore with that identification or I’ll have to follow through with the notice against personal attacks and invention of persona carried in every issue of this web-site. I’m not kidding. Begone. And if you’re not out of here for good, I’m going to spend every dime I have to find out who you are, announce my findings and employ a variant of legal rodent spray to get rid of you.

Political Shootout.

“Political Shootout” Sunday will begin at 8 p.m. notwithstanding a technical interruption last week…and will feature Alderman Joe Moore of the 49th ward and a new face, John Curry, skilled litigator, all-round good guy who has played key roles in many Illinois campaigns and who held a major policy role in the Reagan Justice Department. His support for Reagan extends back to 1976 when as a major operative he supported the 40th president in his drive to upset Gerald Ford. He is a regular correspondent for this web-site.

Trib’s Affair with Obama.

There are some times when I genuinely throw up my hands at the vacuity of the “Tribune’s” editorial positions. Here is a newspaper that pretends to be a national one with purportedly a moderately conservative point of view on the economy, on regulation, on foreign policy. Then it comes out as it did yesterday with a full-scale hurrah for Barack Hussein Obama’s running for president…and, worse, alleges that Obama is no polarizing figure, as is—and it cites them—Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich. Again: Obama is no polarizing figure.

The fact is, gentleman and lady or ladies, you have just fallen for the David Axelrod image…which maintains as Obama himself says in his book “The Audacity of Hope”…which should be characterized as the audacity of hype…so audacious itself that these words could well have been strung together by Axelrod himself: “I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” And the “Tribune” buys that hook, line and sinker.

A “tabula raza,” eh? Take the social issues first. Here is a guy who as state senator heard the testimony of a nurse from Christ Hospital that she found a baby whimpering in a death throe, stuffed in a dirty linen room at the hospital, the product of a botched abortion…left there to die. Infanticide, right? The nurse, Jill Stanek, took the child and tried to rescue it but was denied any help from the hospital. So she did the only thing she could do which was to nurture the child until a few minutes later it died in her arms. She protested to the hospital, was fired, ran for the state House, lost but took the case for passage of a “Born Alive” bill that would prevent this insufferable infanticide to the state legislature. She appeared before the committee headed by that master of moderation…that blank screen on which people of all stripes project their views…Barack Obama who opposed the bill. The U. S. Congress finally passed a federal bill in 2003 under her protests. Great numbers of Democrats in both Houses voted for the bill that Obama as a state legislator opposed. That’s real moderation, isn’t it? What you guys say should be inculcated in the White House.

This same “tabula raza” when he went to the Senate refused to join the group of fourteen Senators who tried to head off a filibuster so as to get some nominees to receive full consideration without blockage. In his book he praises the efforts and notes coyly that he was not part of it. The same “tabula raza” opposed even the confirmation of the Chief Justice, being only one of 22 to do so. Moreover, this same U. S. Senator in his audacious book pronounces that of the $9 trillion in national debt, “the bulk of the debt is a direct result of the President’s tax cuts.” Wrong as any kid who would take Civics 101 could disprove. The tax cuts—which the “Tribune” supported, by the way—involved less than one-tenth of that amount.

And this same “tabula raza”—the blank slate upon which so many Americans of both parties pin their hopes and dreams—also laments that the Bush administration has been stingy with the National Institutes of Health. Under Bush, for God’s sake, its budget grew by more than $8 billion or 40%. This year the administration proposes to double federal funding for the physical sciences over the next decade. What in the name of God are you guys doing in that Ivory Tower instead of jerking on Axelrod’s line and flopping your paper into his boat? This same “tabula raza”—the blank slate that gives all Americans so much hope—voted against CAFTA which you people endorsed. In his time in the Senate, Obama has a 100% ADA rating; in the same period of time Ted Kennedy has a 95% ADA rating. And you buy the Axelrod dogma that Obama is a blank slate on which independents and some Republicans want to project their hopes and dreams. And that Hillary Clinton is the polarizing one. Quite candidly: are you crazy? Do you wonder why your newspaper is regarded as one which doesn’t know what it believes?

All of this leads to one inescapable conclusion. You write your editorials the same way your marketing department proposes to expand your readership—crassly, cynically and with no regard for intellectual consistency. In short, you cannot be taken seriously. I understand you guys are “New York Times” wannabes. Well, what you’ve done is precisely a mirror image of the “Times” urging Newt Gingrich to run—a candidate at variance with all or most of its earlier prescribed views.

Now, obviously, your social issues, tailored as they are to the Hinsdale country-club, would not be the same as mine. But at the very least, give this a thought if you’re capable of it. Here’s a guy who is campaigning against AIDS. Fine. But wouldn’t it interest you to know that the Centers for Disease Control have said that the number one cause of the spread of AIDS in the U. S.—47%--is “male-to-male sexual contact.” That’s the contact Obama supports politically. The number two cause of AIDS according to the Centers is “injection drug use.” As state senator, Obama voted to make hypodermic needles easily accessible in legislation that also deregulated how they are disposed.

The third leading cause of AIDS is heterosexual sex—17%. Obama disavows abstinence education. He stated in a recent speech that “I unequivocally disagree” with any attempt to supplement abstinence with condoms. He wants more condom education. Do you realize that the condom failure rate for sperm is about 20% and the HIV virus is much smaller than sperm which means that while one can only get pregnant between twelve and twenty-four hours a month, one can contact HIV at any time, seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. You obviously realize that this “tabula raza” opposes the Defense of Marriage Act.

Still, the “Tribune’ plays the Axelrod game that here is a Bambi like innocent post baby-boomer who is unlike Hillary Clinton, a baby-boomer tied down with all those pesky baby boomer issues.

Until your stupid editorial came out, I never fully comprehended how totally bankrupt your editorial policies are. No one, no Chicagoan, no Illinoisan, should bother to even consider a “Tribune” point of view again because there is very little doubt that your merchandising of Obama falls right in line with the marketing plan of your business office…and you fell like a ripe plum into Axelrod’s lap. You should regard your paper as a shopper—because, frankly, that’s what it is. For all its hyper-ventilating over Obama, the “Sun-Times” whose editorial positions dove-tails with his, at least knows what it believes. What are you going to do in the future now, when the business office suggests you endorse McCain as it very well may do—punt? Hope that people won’t remember? Give me a break.