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.

Chi Trib on Saturday is its best day.  Today’s editorials, for instance, get right to the heart of their matters, offering data not blather and making a reader think.  The first is about the rude, crude dunces in our state senate arguing their need for a pay raise, or rather Sen. Rickey Hendon, who gets ugly talking to reporters.

The state house rejected the pay raise 94-8.  Hendon, chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, says they want one but won’t admit it, and in fact want to “pimp” the senators, i.e. get them to do the dirty work, presumably as a true-life pimp gets whores to do it.  On the other hand, a pimp is a sales rep, I thought, for women who need them to find higher-paying customers.  (Looking for help on this one.)

He also slammed his presumed colleague, Sen. Susan Garrett, who apparently is rich and has a big house.  “Have you seen her house? Go up there. Mind-boggling.”  Garrett, he said, is among “the filthy rich [who] are always the ones saying, hey, we don’t need the raise.” 

As opposed, for instance, to senate president Emil Jones, who earlier complained: “I need a pay raise! I need a pay raise!” and added jocularly to reporters this day, “I’ve got to get me some food stamps.”  The senate crown sits easily on that man’s head.

Garrett to reporters in self-defense:

This bill should not be reflective of what kind of money legislators have in the bank. . . . It should be reflective . . . of letting taxpayers know that we believe we deserve a raise or don’t deserve a raise. It should not be personal.

As for the pay-raise:

[S]ome of the legislators have missed the point, if they think they need the raise because, you know, they’re not making $150,000 a year. We’re here as public servants and we’re not here to assume we should be entitled to be receiving major increases every year when the rest of the state and other state employees are suffering.

The Trib concludes that the senate should reject the pay raise, adding that if the pay were performance-based, “they’d be sending the money back to the taxpayers.” 

Oddly, this conclusion is not posted.  Neither is the second editorial, “Rose Bowl secrets.”  So buy the paper.

Later: The conclusion has been posted, but the 2^nd editorial remains a hard-copy-only treasure.

Sun-Times man Steve Huntley weighs in on aldermen as advisors to the U.S. government rather than allocation of pothole repairs:

What to do about Iran must cause countless sleepless nights for countless generals, Pentagon strategists and political leaders in the White House and Congress. Now they’re going to get advice from the Chicago City Council.

Yes, and in Chicago style, the fix is in:

The Council’s Human Relations Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing today on a resolution “opposing any U.S. attack on Iran.” The full Council could vote on it on Wednesday. The results are a foregone conclusion. Today’s hearing features among its witnesses the anti-war figure Scott Ritter and John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago professor known for seeing “Israel lobby” machinations behind U.S. foreign policy.

And as this blog made much of two days ago, the eminent Stephen Kinzer, apparently late of the NY Times and currently teaching at apparently two universities in this area, will also testify, surely about U.S. failures in the Middle East — a specialty of his — and the trouble with jousting with Iran.

Huntley notes “the lone voice” opposing the resolution, that of Ald. James A. Balcer (11th), a war hero from Viet Nam war days on grounds of “sending a wrong signal about protecting the lives of the young men and women our nation sends in harm’s way” (Huntley’s words). 

Note the eight-alderman sponsorship of the bill, including Joseph A. Moore (49th) and Toni Preckwinkle (4th) and newcomers like Sandi Jackson (7th) and Robert W. Fioretti (2nd).  These are your Obama liberals, if I may introduce a phrase into discussion of Chicago ward politics — thinking man’s and woman’s liberals, you know, who think globally and act locally, you know, cherishing their illusions through the thick and thin of gaping potholes and murder in the streets.  God bless ‘em.

In the matter of what makes Hillary run (and not stop), this from Emily’s List founder Ellen Malcolm touches a nerve:

We might scoff at the identity politics run wild in this election cycle. But this personal identification [of low-income working women with Mrs. C.] and the sense that once again one of their own has been aced out by a young, glib, and underqualified male will be a bitter pill to swallow for many of Clinton’s staunchest supporters.

Young, glib, and underqualified, eh?  You don’t have to be a low-income working woman to find that nicely said.

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.