LA Times has a story that makes the seasoned observer wonder if the White House isn’t throwing the Chicago Olympic Committee under the bus.

“The intelligence that we had from the U.S. Olympic Committee and Chicago bid team was that it was very close and therefore well worth our efforts,” said Valerie Jarrett, a senior White House advisor. “The message was that . . . a personal appeal from the president would make a huge difference.”

At first, Obama was to do some “quiet lobbying.”

Working from the White House, he placed calls to half a dozen influential people, including IOC President Jacques Rogge. It quickly became clear that other heads of state were doing the same thing — especially the president of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

“It was apparent when he made those calls that Lula had been there [made calls?] earlier,” senior White House aide David Axelrod said.

Jarrett, “a strong proponent of the drive to deliver the Games,” urged that Obama make the trip.  So did Daley, of course.  Obama wanted to go, but had to be sure Health Care would not be on the Senate floor.  Chicago kept pushing.

Daley and Patrick Ryan, chairman of Chicago 2016, were among those who told the White House that the nose count showed a presidential visit might close the sale, Jarrett said.

She excuses them:

“It’s a secret ballot. You can’t necessarily be certain that the people who tell you they’ll vote for you ultimately will,” Jarrett said. “So I’m sure they did the very best they could do to get the intelligence they had.”

So.  It’s done this way, subtly, indirectly.  You can’t blame them for being wrong, dead wrong about sending the President across the waters.  And you certainly can blame him or his supposed wise advisors.

There’s the nil nisi bonum rule for the just-deceased — say “nothing but good” about them (de mortuis).  This is the rule mainstreamers, or now you see “legacy media,” follow about Obama. 

The spin is constant, indeed dizzying, as described in the matter of job losses in a recession by James Taranto, whose “Best of the Web Today” feature has been gracing the Wall Street Journal site for many years.

Taranto quotes a free-market think tank which has studied and compared network TV coverage of bad times under Reagan with coverage under Obama.

The Business & Media Institute analyzed network unemployment stories [when] data was released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics between March 2009 to September 2009 and March 1982 to September 1982.

The networks

“were 13 times more negative in their treatment of Reagan than Obama.” Twenty of 22 stories mentioning the Reagan administration portrayed it negatively, versus 1 out of 15 that mentioned the Obama administration.

The perpetrator most familiar to today’s viewers was ABC’s Charles Gibson, then a Capitol Hill correspondent, who found nothing good in the 1982 report.  “All the numbers are bad,” he said and quoted Dem critics including Wisconsin Congressman Henry Reuss, who characterized Reagan’s policies as not “just mistaken,” but “wicked.”

By 2009, anchorman Gibson had developed a sunny outlook, announcing for his ABC audience that “sometimes a bad jobs report can look good.”  Reporting that 345,000 lost their jobs, he found hope.

“[T]he number was smaller than economists had predicted, and that’s good news,” he pronounced, even if the 9.4 percent unemployment rate was “pretty bad.” He made no mention of Obama at all.  A few months later, in August, he thought the economy “may be finally turning the corner.”

It’s “Candide” revisited.

Liars figure, figures . . . do what?

Tell us the grim truth about (a) the economy, (b) the stimulus/recovery plan, and (c) White House truthiness.

(From Instapundit, who got it from Don Surber.)

From Mr. Patrick Hickey, about the latest from what he calls Wilmette-Talking-To–Winnetka, Chicago’s premier leftist-public tee-vee station:

Last night I witnessed Race-baiting Professional Rev. Jesse Jackson serve up more nonsense to the ever supple-spined Phil Ponce on Chicago Tonight. In essence, the arch-race-baiter and Cop Hater, Jesse Jackson, parsed the Fenger murder into a ‘Lack of adequate Police’ nonsense.

Jackson even blamed [torturer] Burge [long-time gone from scene] for the Fenger beat down – click my post title for the WTTW Jesse Fest. [Host with the leastest Phil] Ponce could not be anymore amoeba-like in his Bill Moyers cupped chin-gee-whiz Jesse affection.

See Jesse, see Phil here.

It is to chuckle, if not laugh out loud (LOL to texters), to read this alleged refutation in Sun-Times of Drudge Report’s story, now scrubbed, about pressure on WFLD-32 to drop its coverage of the anti-Olympics web site.

Chicago 2016 spokesman Patrick Sandusky said he did speak to the Fox news outlet Thursday about possibly doing a follow-up story to the station’s first piece after questions about the site arose, but he never demanded they stop reporting on the Web site. “It’s what anyone in my position would have done,” Sandusky said.

That sure ices it.  The 2016 spokesman denied it, so Lew Lazare can use this lede:

A Drudge Report news blog item was off the mark in an item it posted late Sunday night.

And the copy desk can faithfully compose this head:

Drudge wrong on Web site report

And if you weren’t convinced, this should do it:

[A] WFLD spokeswoman released a copy of a story the station intended to run on its Monday evening newscast. In that story, WFLD said it “chose” to discontinue referring to the ChicagoansForRio Web site until “its authenticity could be verified.”

After that friendly call from the 2016 man.

A little nuance, please, from S-T? 

On the other hand: As noted above, Drudge has scrubbed the item, which does nothing to erase the incredibility of the S-T story, assuming credibility is important.

[Tip of fedora to Political Lore]

God bless Father Pfleger for being on hand to console the grieving mother over the murder of her son outside a South Side community center.

And our condolences to him on having no reason to bus kids and mothers down to the State of Illinois building to protest inaction on new gun controls to go with unenforceable gun controls already in place. 

He would have to protest against easy accessibility to lethal two-by-fours.

He did manage something quotable, however:

“No longer should our children be living in this kind of fear,” said the Rev. Michael Pfleger of St. Sabina’s Church. “It’s time to forego guns and two-by-fours and have that stop being the way we treat and handle each other.”

Note he said “forego,” not “ban.” Nothing profound there, but enough to head off a new slogan, “Two-by-fours don’t kill, people do.”

The drums, they are a-thumping for 2016 in Chicago:

The 2016 Olympic Games in Chicago would bring the world to our doorsteps.

The games would bring sorely needed development to the near South Side.

The Games would bring jobs.

But perhaps, most importantly, the Games would bring magic.

Thank you, Sun-Times, for my favorite editorial today in the whole, wide world.

When Chicago’s businesslike 2016 Olympic bid team makes its final presentation in Copenhagen on Friday, expect to hear its purposeful pitch softened by emotional chords, with first lady Michelle Obama, and perhaps her husband, President Barack Obama, bringing the appeal to its crescendo.

After 2 1/2 years of working to convince International Olympic Committee members that Chicago can deliver a compact Summer Games in the heart of the city, the bid team needs to warm it up to slide past emotional favorite Rio de Janeiro, as well as well-connected Madrid and well-financed Tokyo, observers say.

Thank you, Chi Trib, for this Front Page above-fold right-hand column BIG-NEWS item. 

P.S.: I love that “purposeful pitch,” which in another context would have been a slider just nicking the outside corner, down and out.