A liberal friend of mine cancelled her Chi Trib subscription some time back, indignant over its front-page policy of mimicking Sun-Times with sensational grabbers.  The Trib soon thought better of that adventure and at least modified its incipient tabloidism.

But I think something else had her and has other libs cobbed, and it’s John Kass, who combines slam-bang coverage of the Mayordaley II machine with national-framework conservatism.  And I’m not sure which gets them madder, though you’d think the vigilance over Chicago politics would be a no-brainer favorable vote.

Not so, I have come to believe, because so-called social issues and love of government have come to trump all, and Mayordaley II is correct on all related points, willing at least to overlook stuff that sent his father up the wall — race– and gay-related matters come immediately to mind — and love of government remains a rock-solid foundation for him as it was for his father.

His motto could be “Holy mother the state,” to quote Dorothy Day, the reformed Marxist and uncanonized Catholic laywoman saint, and that suits today’s libs.

Anyhow, today’s Kass has MD-2’s “terrifying alter ego” Mayor Chucky, as in horror-movie anti-hero, with

aggravated facial expressions . . . hand waving, great circular motions from the shoulder . . . sneering, the finger pointing, and finally, the angry lip curling

asserting itself in a news conference — scheduled to talk about something else, for gosh sakes!

It happened when Chi Trib reporter Dan Blake and ABC-Channel 7’s Charles Thomas “figured they should act like reporters, not press agents” and asked him about insider-developer (plus Board of Ed President and Olympic committee ethics czar) Michael Scott Sr.’s painfully obvious cashing in on the coming Olympics.

The mayor refused to discuss it.  Blake asked when he would discuss it.

“Oh, I do it every day  . . .  You’ve been with me every day. NEVER insult me with that question! You’re insulting me because every day I’m here, you’re never here. And don’t print that! So I know, you’ll print it.”

Kass:

Huh? What? All Blake asked was a legitimate question about when the mayor would answer a legitimate question.

The mayor discussed it the next day,

but only long enough to deny, deny, deny and say reporters were making it all up just to hurt his feelings and ruin everything. “You come to conclusions, you’re trying to hurt [Olympics year] 2016. I don’t know why. … You come to conclusions!”

Kass:

What will happen if Chicago actually wins the 2016 Olympics?

We’ll have lots and lots of insider deals.

And we’ll have lots of Mayor Chucky.

Kass names Blake and Thomas but not the other mainstreamers on hand going along with the MD-2 program for the day — not his skywalking atop Willis Tower of a day earlier, but infrastructure developments.

Whatever “the stunt of the moment,”

reporters . . . give oodles of coverage to the news managed out of the mayor’s press office.  . . .  And then you see the stunt on TV, the ribbon cutting or the meet-and-greet with the children or the seniors, and you think you’re actually watching the news. [Italics added — it’s why people turn to the ‘Net]

But criticizing fraternity members even anonymously, is to enter dangerous territory.  Kass sounds ominously like those who accuse mainstreamers of bias towards their favorite party and their favorite political philosophy. 

If his reporting on civic corruption isn’t enough to make libs uneasy and send them scurrying to the NY Times comfort zone, his critique of the main stream, even if veiled, would be enough.  You don’t do that in j-circles. 

Probably not in j-schools either, where the first step of the Twelve, “My name is ____ , and I am a biased liberal,” is probably rarely taken.

So it is that Chi Trib, for all its fluff and relative unreadability (vs. Sun-Times, which has its own problems) has this alter ego — not only Kass but a fleet of energetic civic-corruption investigators — that terrifies true-blue liberal readers for whom the state is, sans irony, a holy mother.

This with apologies to those who, like Dorothy Day, reserve that encomium sans irony for the Church of Rome.