The Big O., imagining himself talking to Ahmadinejad, has spoken of the Iranian people as deserving consideration, as if talking to A. is a step towards giving them some. 

But Chamberlain’s talking to Hitler undercut the generals who wanted room in which to drop H. in his tracks, Steve Huntley noted yesterday.  The German people’s enthrallment to him was not weakened by talking to him, it was cemented.

O. doesn’t seem to understand.  Liberation movements are thwarted by legitimizing tyrants, and he, President O. would foolishly do just that. 

Oh, not A., he has his spokesman say, but “the Iranian leadership.” 

“He hasn’t named who that leader will be,” [foreign policy adviser Susan Rice] said. “It may, in fact be that by the middle of next year, Ahmadinejad is long gone.”

If he isn’t, then what?  A rather new ball game and quite a comedown from his youthful boldness of last July when he promised to meet the leaders of Iran and four other enemy countries without preconditions during his first year in the White House.

Or does he he think A. the Iranian front man will step aside and let him talk to the mullahs?  Sad to say, he appears not to know s—t from shinola, if you will pardon my Francais.

Ohhh, like I’m scared!

“The GOP, should I be the nominee, I think can say whatever they want to say about me, my track record. If they think that they’re going to try to make Michelle an issue in this campaign, they should be careful.

The Big O. will come and get you.  No fair to say boo about wife.  “She loves this country.”

That’s why she said in Milwaukee in February, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country” — which at best was a dumb thing to say.  And folks, it was a campaign speech.

Lynn Sweet provides perspective:

[S]he has taken on major fund-raising and surrogate speaking roles on behalf of her husband, even phoning superdelegates to try to close the deal for him. Michelle Obama has her own chief of staff and press secretary, and campaign advance staffers handle her larger events, where she has turned out to be a significant draw in her own right.  . . . . Spouses are not exempt from scrutiny if they are major surrogates.

She’s on staff, in other words.  Big O. is full of it in this obvious case of spinning stuff to his advantage.

He should also can the lovey-dovey stuff with her, as in the shot on p. 3 of today’s Sun-Times, if only because it reminds viewers and readers of Al (There’s Money in Global Warming) Gore’s juicy smack on Tipper’s lips at the 2004 [oops! 2000, but I remember it like yesterday] convention — which Nick Gillespie called “part of an unprecedented invitation into the private life of a political candidate.”

If you missed the “sweetie” comment to a female reporter, here it is.  If it had been “Buster” or “buddy boy,” it would still have been condescending.  This comes to the Big O. naturally, it appears.

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.