Blithe Spirit, the Blog

I see Smooth Stephen Kinzer is letting his activism get the better of him and intends to testify, and not under subpoena, to Chicago’s aldermen as an instrument of Joe Moore’s foreign-policy leftism.  It’s official then, he’s no longer a reporter but a man whose biases — ahem, his conclusions based on extensive research — have got the better of him. 

Here’s one of one of his talking points, as appearing on the (left-wing) UK Guardian website, where it’s not clear for what publication he wrote it:

By naming his favourite military officer, General David Petraeus, to head the US Central Command, President Bush evidently hopes to terrify Iran. Americans and people in the rest of the world, however, have at least as much reason to be terrified as anyone in Tehran.

Kinzer is or was the NY Times man in Chicago but hasn’t written about political corruption.  You can get your hands dirty that way.  Rather, he’s playing ball with Chi Dems dying to see one of their own in the White House, arguing for one of his more notorious policy positions, of the “Can’t we sit down and talk?” variety. 

That would be the Big O., featured in the John Kass column today as “magically unstained” by the “Chicago way” of doing things.  Kinzer is a longstanding believer in the U.S. as mideast bungler, but he might pay heed to his being used by the left.

He will make aldermanic eyes glaze over, I expect.  See K’s ideas on the Iranian matter also in today’s Chi Trib (Left-wing) Perspective section, where he is i’d’d as a journalism and political science teacher at Northwestern U. 

(But in Oak Park we hear of him as teaching at Dominican U., River Forest.  He’s left the Times?  His most recent byline is Feb. 11; so either he has a very easygoing gig or is no longer at the Times.)

In any case, wine and cheese will not be served to the aldermen, those doughty protectors of their right to make money hand over ringed pinky, as Royko used to speak of.  But they will like whatever helps their man Obama.

Reporters swoon at Obama:

John Harris, editor of Politico.com, has said he was forced to put certain reporters sent to cover Mr. Obama through a rehab program after they returned to the office. Back in January, NBC News anchor Brian Williams noted that Lee Cowan, the reporter NBC had sent to cover Mr. Obama, had told him that “it is hard to stay objective covering this guy.”

Somehow, however:

Some media reevaluations of Mr. Obama are now taking place, fueled in part by revelations such as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that are hard to ignore. But the simple truth is that Mr. Obama has had a free media ride for so long that he effectively wrapped up the Democratic nomination before any of his political weaknesses were generally known.

John Fund delivering this, for the excellent Wall St. Journal Political Diary.

Obama’s exaggerations, doubletalk, and systematic deception are “unappealing,” but also “unexceptional” for the politico on the campaign trail, says City Journal’s Fred Siegel in The Australian, but he fingers O. as a special case, with reference to his Chicago base:

What makes it different is that there’s not just a gap but a chasm between his actions and his professed principles, which would normally kill a candidacy. And because his deeds are so few, the disparity is all the more salient.

Obama, far more than the others, is the “judge me by what I say and not what I do” candidate. He wants to be the conscience of the country without necessarily having one himself.

Look to the Chicago Connection and his “conventional Chicago racial and patronage politics,” says Siegel, citing its “political and cultural tribalism,” where

racial reform has meant that the incumbent mayor, Richard M. Daley, has been cutting blacks in on the loot. Louis Farrakhan, Jackson, Jeremiah Wright and Obama are all, in part, the expression of that politics.

Siegel cites John Kass’s “Chicago way” and says:

At no point did Obama, the would-be saviour of US politics, challenge this corruption, except for face-saving gestures as a legislator. He was, in his own Harvard law way, a product of it.

Why did Chi pols anoint him?  To make themselves look good.

Obama first played a perfuming role as a state senator. His mentor, Emil Jones, the machine-made president of the Senate, allowed him to sponsor a minor ethics bill. In return, Obama made sure to send plenty of pork to Jones’s district. When asked about pork-barrel spending, Jones famously replied: “Some call it pork; I call it steak.”

He’s Jones’s boy — word used not as in Deep South but as at City Hall.   Tony Allen-Mills in The Times of London:

Long before Barack Obama launched his campaign for the White House, when he was considering a run for the US Senate in 2003, he paid an intriguing visit to a former Chicago sewers inspector who had risen to become one of the most influential African-American politicians in Illinois.

“You have the power to elect a US senator,” Obama told Emil Jones, Democratic leader of the Illinois state senate. Jones looked at the ambitious young man smiling before him and asked, teasingly: “Do you know anybody I could make a US senator?”

According to Jones, Obama replied: “Me.” It was his first, audacious step in a spectacular rise from the murky political backwaters of Springfield, the Illinois capital.

The father-son motif arises:

Jones, 71, describes himself as Obama’s “godfather” and once said: “He feels like a son to me.”

Or, per Todd Spivak in the Houston Press, Jones became “Obama’s kingmaker”:

Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city’s most popular black call-in radio ­program.

I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:

“He said, ‘Cliff, I’m gonna make me a U.S. Senator.’”

“Oh, you are? Who might that be?”

“Barack Obama.”

As a state senator, “he made a specialty of voting present,” says Siegel.  But in the U.S. senate, he was “such a down-the-line partisan that, according to Congressional Quarterly, in the past two years he has voted with the Democrats more often than did the party’s majority leader, Harry Reid.”

Likewise, for all his talk of post-racialism, Obama has played, with the contrivance of the press, traditional South Side Chicago racial politics.  . . . .   [W]hites who are at odds with, or who haven’t delivered for, Chicago politicians can be obliquely accused of racism on the flimsiest basis, but pillars of local black politics such as Wright, with his exclusivist racial theology, are beyond criticism.

More more more is at this site.

The Chicago Defender has stayed with the “massacre” in the longtime-black, until recently peaceful Chatham neighborhood.

An unpaid debt by one of the five people found murdered inside a Chatham home may be at the root of the killings, sources said Tuesday [4/29]. A home in the 7600 block of South Rhodes Avenue was the scene of a backyard barbeque April 22 that lasted into the wee hours of the night.

When one of the attendees returned to the home the next day, she found the back door ajar and the music blaring. She went inside, saw her friends–two women and three men–dead and called 911. Police have not determined when the massacre took place, but a source said a neighbor heard gunshots about 2:30 a.m., but did not call police.

Oh my.  What’s in that not calling police at 2:30 when you hear shots?  It’s the beginning of the end of a quiet neighborhood.  There has to be indignation when shots are heard, and a willingness to raise hell.

I have felt that indignation, though not at gunshots.  Rather, on being told of lewd suggestions made by black kids from nearby Chicago to some of our kids playing in the Beye School playground across the street in the 70s.

They heard me yelling from a front porch a block away, as I ran across the street towards the offenders, kids in their early teens.  Someone else called the cops.  I chased the offenders off the playground.  They ran east toward Austin Boulevard, the Oak Park-Chicago boundary, not waiting to hear my beef because who wants to hear what a crazy man wants to say?

It was after school had been left out.  One of the teachers, a veteran whom we knew and liked, took umbrage at my display, commenting to one of our kids then or the next day, I forget.  I told the cop, who said they had hightailed out of reach, that at least they know a wild man lives here, meaning they would try some other block to pull their stuff.

Meanwhile, on the Chatham block, there had been problems that the alderman and police say they never had been told about. 

An investigation into whether a prostitution ring was being run out of the home is also underway. . . .   Neighbors said there was plenty of foot traffic in and out of the home during late night hours. However, there were no complaints filed with the alderman’s office, Ald. Freddrenna Lyle (6th) said hours after the bodies were found. The neighborhood’s police district commander also said no alarming activity has been reported to the police about the home.

““I’ve lived in this area for more than 20 years, and it’s always been quiet,” said one woman.

And maybe it will be for 20 years more.  But cops and residents and alderman have to be in contact.

Later: Reader B. wonders, “how the neighbors knew there was in excess of $20 grand taken??????  seems oddly specific.”

Regarding this in the Defender story:

Other neighborhood reports are that a large amount of cash–in excess of $20,000–and high end televisions and stereo systems were taken from the home before the bodies were discovered. While police declined to confirm or deny the allegations, they said the incident is isolated and robbery is the likely motive. 

Mark Brown continues thrashing about, offering us a picture of the thoroughly frustrated liberal.  “A lot of white people are freaked out by Wright,” he says.  But “Obama isn’t scary.”

As a member of Wright’s church, he’s not necessarily a Wright “disciple.”  No?  Why did he join and why attend?  He didn’t live near it, it’s not a neighborhood church.  Like many Catholics and many more Protestants, he shopped for a preacher and found one, 20 years ago, and stayed with him until about 36 hours ago. 

He didn’t pick this church for its liturgy, did he?  OK, maybe the music.  But look, just how much good music can make up for squirming through a ranting sermon you disagree with?  Or even a non-ranting one.

In any case, this United Church of Christ denomination, descended from the Pilgrims, is quintessentially Protestant and therefore pulpit-oriented, not altar-oriented.  O. picked this guy for his preaching and his leadership, not as someone to make him uncomfortable in the pew.

“There’s no secret black agenda that Obama is waiting to promote if he becomes president,” says Brown.  Oh my, this is playground argument.  Brown should quote the guy who said this.

Brown is smug about this: “My point struck painfully close to home,” he says of antagonistic letters he got but does not quote.  He pricked our consciences, did he?  The less his argument convinced people, the better it was?  The madder people get, the more sure he is he’s right.

He knows their deepest thoughts and motivation:

Part of [what people object to] is Wright’s ignorance and part of it is his arrogance and part of it is that he talks louder than white people would prefer and part of it is that he uses the sing-song cadence they associate with other black ministers they have grown to hate over the years such as Jesse Jackson.

We should really be leaving Mark Brown alone.  As an admitted white liberal he is better than us, just really special in every way.  All these years in Oak Park and you don’t understand that.  I just can’t believe it!

I’ve seen this happen so many times in politics where black candidates are involved that I’ve lost track. An opponent has trouble attacking the black candidate, so they find somebody connected to the candidate and attack them. I can’t say why this is more prevalent with black politicians unless it’s that the black experience has produced more fringe players who can be used for this purpose.

I know racism when I see it, and the Rev. Wright affair has it in full bloom.

. . . don’t give me the “double standard” baloney. If we could ever clean up the white racism, the thing that some of you consider black racism would take care of itself.

Some measure of how uninformed is Mark Brown’s assessment (below) of Rev. Wright may be gotten from today’s Beachwood Reporter, which cites and links:

* Rolling Stone magazine of 14 months ago (through The Daily Howler), describing Obama’s church in radical terms and Obama as its preacher’s grateful disciple:

This is as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much Malcolm X as Martin Luther King Jr. . . .  The senator ‘affirmed’ his Christian faith in this church; he uses Wright as a ’sounding board’ to ‘make sure I’m not losing myself in the hype and hoopla.’ Both the title of Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope, and the theme for his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 come from Wright’s sermons. ‘If you want to understand where Barack gets his feeling and rhetoric from,’ says the Rev. Jim Wallis, a leader of the religious left, ‘just look at Jeremiah Wright.’  [Italics added]

On this The Beachwood Reporter commented that it “strains credulity . . . when Obama says Wright is not the same man he has known for 20 years.”

As the Rolling Stone article shows, this is indeed the same Wright - and that’s what concerned Obama so much when he announced his campaign for president that he stuck Wright in a basement.

and

* NY Times of a year ago, which reports the invocation cancellation:

“[Obama] had sampled various faiths but adopted none until he met Mr. Wright, [whose] assertions of widespread white racism and . . . scorching remarks about American government . . . prompted the senator to cancel his delivery of the invocation when he formally announced his candidacy in February.

Wright comes off as a longtime irresponsible extremist, rather than the “generally well-intentioned guy who sometimes says some crazy stuff by white people’s standards” of Brown’s dream world.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the “God-damn America” man, is “a generally well-intentioned guy who sometimes says some crazy stuff by white people’s standards,” says Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown.

He’s not “this bad, scary guy” that “some people would have you believe,” and neither is his parishioner Obama.  We know this because we’ve been watching him for nearly a year and a half and “definitely have learned some things we didn’t know about him when we started.” 

By now we have “a sense of the man” as “a guy who generally tries to play it safe, who looks for the middle ground” in no way “covering up something sinister,” says Brown, adding an ironic “Please.” 

Brown wants it all to stop.  (His colleague Mary Mitchell cries out, “Leave Jeremiah Wright alone!)  We know all there is to know about Obama, he says.  We know he’s not bad and scary because we have seen him campaigning:

These political candidates can only manipulate their own image to a point. Even with a tightly controlled candidate like Obama, the veneer gets peeled back sooner or later. You see them more or less for who they are.

Right.  And that’s the process going on right now.  But Brown has bailed out.  He’s not paying attention.  As for those who are still paying attention, fascinated by the peeling process, they basically welcome the chance to act on their prejudices. 

Brown:

I take it as a positive that [Obama] didn’t try to sweep away this part of his life [Wright, etc.] in preparation for the campaign.

Obama probably didn’t fully appreciate, though, that there was always a segment of America that was looking for an excuse to justify being against him.

Ah.  The unwashed.  Obama’s unreasonable critics.

Mark Brown has good clean fun in his Sun-Times column with Indiana-Illinois hostilities, which frankly come as news to me, with talk along the way of bringing “the presidential campaign” — he means the Democrat primary — to a “merciful conclusion.”

Fun is fun, and it’s Sunday morning in Chicago, but the odd Republican here and there, and even the not-odd, thinks this Obama-Clinton fracas is the nicest thing to happen since Grant took Richmond.  The Civil War reference is apt.  Those Dems, tripping on their own petards of identity politics — black vs. female in this case — are in big trouble, heading for Denver in August when s—t will hit the fan and splash all over everyone.

So go, Hill, who has deflated or at least lowered pressure in the Barack balloon, as he did to hers a while back.  And Dems, keep parcelling out elected delegates proportionally, state by state, keeping the race close.  McGovernology rules!

“Meet Professor Obama,” says Chi Trib’s John McCormick.  He’s

the sometimes aloof campaigner who can come across as a bit smug and has been known to talk about such things as arugula, an upscale leafy green, in places like corn-fed Iowa.

You can feel you’re in his classroom.  He likes order in the classroom.

“Everybody have a seat,” he said . . . in Gary, Ind., as he finished a speech and prepared to take questions. “We’ve still got a little more work to do.”

He tells how to behave:

“Now, there are only a few rules. Rule No. 1: Raise your hand. Don’t shout out at me because there are going to be more questions than I have time,” he said.  . . . . 

He betrays “professorial tendencies,” which “could . . . be used against him in a general election, especially if the liberal elitist branding takes hold,” says McC. 

He was “clumsy” in San Fran when he talked of Pennsylvania job-deprived as clinging to guns or religion, he said, is irritated by accusations of inability to relate to working-class people, but things like “actuarially speaking” come out readily.

Chi Trib studied how he talks.  He’s understandable by high-school seniors or college frosh, Trib found, “two grade levels above Sen. Hillary Clinton,” who speaks to h.s. sophs or juniors.

He scolds, mocked young woman with cell phone in San Antonio: “She’s talking to her girlfriend. She’s all like, ‘Girl, I got a front-row seat.’”  Then a peremptory “Turn off your phone.”

To another in Terre Haute, about to ask him something with something in her mouth: “Take it out.“

He glared at early leavers from small meetings in Iowa. 

But he gets praise as teacher at U. of Chi law school by law prof Cass Sunstein:

“He was thought to be non-ideological, completely prepared, conversational, not full of himself, clear, respectful of all sides and completely on top of the material,”

And from former student Erika Walsh:

“He was one of the least hubristic professors I had.  . . . He’s not an elitist. He certainly has the credentials to be, but he’s interested in people and not condescending at all.”

Hubristic?

On the day after five bodies were found in a house on Chi’s South Side, in the Chatham neighborhood, once with Avalon considered a high-middle to upper-middle class area, Shante Bradford, 30,

a machine operator who leaves for work at 4 a.m., said the neighborhood is so bad he worries about getting robbed each morning when he goes to his car parked on the street.

“It’s really nothing. Death is nothing,” said Bradford, who lives a half-block from the crime scene.

Antoine Edwards, also 30,

an auto mechanic and father of three, said he doesn’t allow his kids to play outside. Instead, when he can, he takes them to places like restaurants or the movies. 

The bodies were found three hours after an anti-violence group CeaseFire and others announced

a plan to flood violent “hot spots” in the city with residents and outreach workers on weekend nights throughout the summer.

One of those who met for the announcement, Rev. Robin Hood (!), said he was expecting “able-bodied people who can to stand up” to the violence-prone to come forth 

Another, Tio Hardiman, said CeaseFire

will attempt to train residents to . . . resolve . . . conflicts and will ask adult men in high-risk neighborhoods . . . to mentor one child on their block.

He blamed the “mind set of these young people” and dismissed gun-law change as helping things.  “They’ve already got all the guns they need,” he said.

For this quite well-reported story, the Trib used three by-lined reporters and writers and six more reporter-contributors.

Meanwhile, on the op-ed page, Trib columnist Steve Chapman made quick work of gun laws, citing police Supt. Jody Weis’s call for a crackdown on assault guns.  Chapman calls this “the moral equivalent of a placebo” but not as good, since placebos “sometimes help.”

“There are just too many weapons here,” he declared at a Sunday news conference. “Why in the world do we allow citizens to own assault rifles?”

We don’t, Chapman reminds the superintendent, not in Chicago.  Moreover,

The gun Weis villainized is a type of semiautomatic that has a fearsome military appearance but is functionally identical to many legal sporting arms.

And its bark is worse than its bite. As of March 31, there had been 87 homicides in the city. When I asked the Chicago Police Department how many of the murders are known to have involved assault rifles, the answer came back: One.

Anyhow, when assault guns were banned federally 1994–2004,

nationwide, the number of murders committed with rifles and shotguns began falling three years before the law was enacted.

It’s true those gun homicides also fell while the law was in effect.

But “stabbing deaths fell even faster, as did murders involving crowbars, baseball bats and other blunt objects.”  Indeed,

[t]he so-called assault weapons, contrary to what you might assume, were no more powerful or lethal than other, permitted guns.

He adds the clincher argument against gun bans:

[C]riminals, the people most likely to commit violent crimes, were completely unaffected by the ban—for the simple reason that they are not allowed to buy or own guns of any kind.

All you need is a little cause-and-effect reasoning.  It’s a terrible thing that takes from the blather of various political and blatherskites when all they want is to mobilize lots of people for bus rides and marches and give them a feeling they are doing something.  Now there’s a placebo for you.