Personal Asides: Correcting the Record on Bob Kjellander…News in One Sentence…Trivia Song Lyric: Let’s See if You’re Old Enough to Play.

Roeser the Corrector.

Just because some people are taking pot-shots at the Illinois Republican National Committeeman Bob Kjellander is no reason to allow some misinformation about him to go by the boards…and misinformation it was, I am told after checking with multiple sources, that led me to report that he was “shopping” around for a presidential candidate before he settled with Mitt Romney. As a matter of fact, the sources—both friendly and unfriendly to him—have confirmed that this was far from the case…that Kjellander has been in firm support of Romney for a long time…that some time ago Sen. John McCain tried to invite Kjellander aboard his own presidential exploratory committee…that Bob courteously listened to the Senator in his office for an hour or so and just as courteously declined and decided to go with Romney.

Nor, am I told, is his role with Romney over-encompassing or super-chairman of this or that. I regret passing along the bad info and thank those prominent Illinoisans from various factions who set me straight. There is a quality in some of the more intemperate critics of him that is identical with Captain Ahab and the white whale Moby Dick…the story which you remember by Herman Melville wherein hatred so consumed Ahab that his vengeance destroyed him and his boat. It was meant to be an allegory of hatred that can consume one’s entire life, folks...and applies as well to those who see in George W. Bush the looming white whale. I have always-always-always maintained that the view nothing whatever can be done until and unless Kjellander is gone is ridiculous, uninformed and emotional in the extreme. Besides, it has nothing to do with politics whatsoever.

I’m getting a bit tired of this continual abuse of him, you know? It tells more of the people purveying it than he. By all means let the process work but stop this incessant bitterness against him.

News in One Sentence Each.

The answer to the first trivia song is “Ragtime Cowboy Joe.” . The song is the official theme of the University of Wyoming. . The answer to the second is “The Wreck of the Old `97.” In answer to one query, I don’t remove criticism of me from this web-site but have been known to do so when it is scatological and involves an innocent third-party.

Trivia Song Lyric.

Again, no search engines. A song often heard at weddings in my youth and which has not been heard for many years had lyrics that ran like this—starting in the middle after the song title was sung:

Or leave a kiss but in the cup/ and I’ll not look for wine/ the thirst that from the soul doth rise/ Doth ask a drink divine: But might I of Jove’s nectar sup/ I would not change for thine.

I sent thee late a rosy wreath Not so much honouring thee/ As giving it hope that there/It could not weathered be/ But thou thereon didst only breathje/ And sent it back to me/ Since when it grows and smells, I swear/ Not of itself but thee.

For bragging rights: who wrote it? He was an English bard.