If it’s Monday, it’s Dennis Byrne and Charles Krauthammer day on Chi Trib op-ed page. Yesterday, that is. In “Not another Chavez chump: Venezuela’s president didn’t count on Chicago being Chicago,” longtime (going back to Chi Daily News glory days) Chicago reporter, writer, and columnist Byrne notes that Chicago (Transit Authority) refused $15 million in free gasoline from U.S.-basher, dissent-crusher, Venezuela-poverty-ignorer Hugo Chavez. It’s not our kind of gas, CTA said. Trade it for your kind, complained Cong. Luis Gutierrez, apparently having no problem with U.S. bashing, dissent crushing, and poverty-at-home ignoring.

The $15 mill would have barely shown up on the CTA billion-dollar budget. One gulp, and there would go Venezuelan oil but not propaganda for S. America’s dictator with the mostest (money). He, that is the country he runs, owns Citgo, which offers no bargains in heavily Spanish-speaking Pilsen, Byrne discovered, and is actually (gulp) an arm of “Big Oil,” which Congr. G. and lib-dem friends usually condemn. Read all about it here or in yesterday’s paper if you haven’t pitched it yet.

Meanwhile, C. Krauthammer exposes Spielberg’s “Munich” as 99% anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian propaganda.

If Steven Spielberg had made a fictional movie about the psychological disintegration of a revenge assassin, that would have been fine. Instead, he decided to call this fiction “Munich” and root it in a real historical event: the 1972 massacre by Palestinian terrorists of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Once you’ve done that–evoked the actual killing of innocents who, but for Palestinian murderers, would not be much older than Spielberg himself today–you have an obligation to get the story right.

K. seems to have it right. S-berg and his writer Tony Kushner have skillfully evoked the Palestinian side of things, for example humanizing the Munich murderers but presenting Israeli pursuers in the worst possible light.

Roger Ebert, however, gave it four stars, calling it “an act of courage and conscience,” in that S-berg had one of his characters say at movie’s end, “There is no peace at the end of this.” (Gimme a P, gimme an A, gimme a PAC, on to I-F-I-C-I-S-M.) Called “an attack on the Palestinians,” the movie is no such thing, says Compleat Leftist (apologies to Isaak Walton) Ebert. “By not taking sides, [Spielberg] has taken both sides.” Ebert essentially writes an apologia for Spielberg, whom he seems dying to defend. Or did he and Krauthammer see different movies?

 

 

Joey the Clown Lombardo “was arrested while sitting in the front passenger seat of a 1994 silver Lincoln parked in an alley outside a home in the 2300 block of North 74th Street,” reports Chi Trib’s Brendan McCarthy, supplying good detail.  But it’s 74th Avenue, as are all north-south numbered streets in west suburbia.  Where was the copy desk? 

“One World, Many Stories” is Trib’s Perspective section page one head.  Subhead says Trib is “one of a handful of American newspapers that field their own foreign correspondents,” etc., which smacks of a promotion, does it not?  First up is Hugh Dellios on “how Mexicans’ need for jobs and [villainous?] America’s drug habits collide at the U.S.-Mexico border.”  Ten other correspondents have stories, each probably respectable.  But the promo feel persists.

Trib’s Kathy Bergen has a page one Business section piece on Berghoff Restaurant closing, “Life’s `perfect’ plate being cleared away: . . .  many longtime workers will lose good-paying unionized jobs with full benefits, increasingly rare for Chicago food-service employees,” which cites high cost of unionization as maybe, in part why it’s closing.  It’s a fair speculation.

Debra Pickett of Sun-Times deserves warning: If I ever meet her, I will hug her, mostly because of today — her discussion and dissection of the latest truth controversy: Front & center, Oprah Winfrey, you lover of dissembling.  Oprah endorses the “emotional truth” defense mounted by fiction author in guise of nonfiction author James Frey of A Million Little Pieces best-seller fame. 

The book’s appeal, abetted by an Oprah show appearance, lay in this guy’s having conquered vice in pursuit of virtue — managing the transition from addict to role model, etc. — which he relayed to the gullible in excruciating detail, much of which he made up.  (For shame!)  Exposed, he says so what?  Said it on Larry King, and Oprah called in to agree with him, blissfully unaware that the halfway alert Oprah fan will be somewhat less likely to be inspired by her show’s next success story. 

If Oprah had any sense in the matter, she would have called in to Larry and reamed the author out.  Not on your Nielsen rating.

Along comes Ms. Pickett, noting that the author once lived in Chicago and drawing comparisons with his plea and Chi scam artists, many in office thanks to gullible voters. 

Read Ms. Pickett, please.  She has a nice touch and in her we may have a durable winner.

Dem interrogators of Alito have their own shady pasts lurking, notes Tom Bevan in Real Clear Politics.

Dennis Byrne has a new McCarthyite.