Seven short years before Mayordaley II rushed to the defense of William Ayers, Ayers called Daley’s father “White and fleshy, [reeking] with the stench of evil” in his 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days.  No problem for the Man from City Hall, who just this week braved a firestorm of censure by calling an alderman “Foie Gras,” cracking wise in Bridgeport fashion.

Seven years.  The Man forgives this guy for saying his father was stinky with evil?  Well, apart from the immediate politics of the matter, Obama being linked more intimately than he has admitted with Ayers the terrorist-turned-UIC-prof-molder-of-minds-of-teachers, there’s the matter of bloodlines and social standing.

Chi Trib’s Ron Grossman traces the bloodline-social-standing issue as well as one could in a thousand words in today’s normally Left-Wing Perspective section, page eight in hardcopy delivered to hundreds of thousands of doorsteps this morning, including ours.

Seven years ago, Ayers’s book came out with the Richard J. Daley reference as white, fleshy, and evil, but the most Richard M. Daley can manage by way of censure — he who reportedly decked a fellow Bridgeportian shortly after his candidacy helped elect a black mayor by splitting the white vote in 1983, said Bridgeportian having chewed him out in a supermarket aisle, he, Daley responding promptly to the verbal attack — is that times were “difficult” and he, Daley, did not “condone what [Ayers] did 40 years ago.”

Forty, yes.

But Richard M.’s profile in courage in this matter is explained by Grossman.  It’s being to the manor born, it’s whom you know, it’s who your daddy was,  Excellent piece.

Same day, different paper, also read “Daley: Whatever It takes,” in Sun-Times, by the incomparable Fran Spielman and see The Man as first-class pragmatist, impatient with lawyers, he says, when he means the law.  Devastating account of the mayor whose genetic disposition towards peremptory behavior — see Royko’s Boss — is a big fat chicken (not stuffed duck) coming home to roost.