Did not find this in Chi Trib

This I lift as is from Instapundit, who got it from here:

“WHAT IS HAPPENING OVER HERE:” An email from a soldier in Iraq. “Gen Petraeus is treating the war like a counter-insurgency rather than a stability operation. . . . there is a HUGE difference between the two. . . . However, you don’t see Harry Reid talking about this. When I saw what he said, it really pissed me off. That guy does not know what is going on over here because he hasn’t bothered to come and find out. The truth on the ground in Al Anbar is not politically convenient for him, so he completely ignored it.”

Not only does Harry R. not get it, but neither do Chi Trib et al.*  Didn’t Pelosi tell Petraeus she couldn’t fit Petraeus into the House schedule?  Yes, at first, but now she thinks he might have something to say, to add to the good stuff she got from the Syrian guy, Bashar al-Assad.  No babuschka this time, however.

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*I’m saying this without a site search, which last time I tried it had an AP story that if it ever appeared in hard copy was very hard to find.  I read the Trib’s hard copy every day, though not word for word, and I know what they play.  Heads and location and story size and big fat picture all go to tell us, this is important.  If the story is hard to find, it isn’t, to them at least.

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Reid speaks, bad guys listen

[A] good name for the increasing body count in Iraq is the “Reid surge,”

says Mackubin Thomas Owens, a dean at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., citing historical precedent from Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s reading Northern newspapers to check on public sentiment about the war to the Tet Offensive in the Viet Nam War, a U.S. victory portrayed as defeat by U.S. media with resultant encouragement of our enemies,

He refers to bomb attacks in Iraq that caused “such carnage in recent days,” identifying them as

the expected consequences of the Democrats’ efforts to undercut the president’s new team and the changed strategy represented by the so-called “surge.” 

What do you know? Chi Trib gives Reid a pass . . .

It’s irritating and borderline repulsive that Chi Trib has run nothing of its own on Sen. Harry Reid’s saying the Iraq war is lost, just an AP story 4/20 about Bush denying the claim, responding in gentlemanly fashion:

“I respect the Democratic leadership,” he said. “We have fundamental disagreements about whether or not helping this young democracy is . . . the consequences of failure or success . . . .”

I did clean that up a bit: AP unsurprisingly lingered on the warts and blemishes of Bush’s spoken word. 

The Trib, on the other hand, protected Reid on the day, of the AP story — Gonzales in the dock was Trib editors’ interest — running nothing in hard copy. 

This is how it’s done.  Reid commits a major gaffe from which he backtracked within hours, but nothing is said.  Today we have him featured, statesmanlike, on P-1 with his measured comments about Bush and the war. 

Chi Trib just knows what’s fit to print, doesn’t it?

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Obama and Rezko: Sun-Times a no-puff zone . . .

Yesterday’s Chi Trib p-1 headline story on Obama’s wife was classic puffery. Today’s Sun-Times story about Obama and the indicted Tony Rezko is what Chicago newspapers are supposed to be doing.

For more than five weeks during the brutal winter of 1997, tenants shivered without heat in a government-subsidized apartment building on Chicago’s South Side.

It was just four years after the landlords — Antoin “Tony’ Rezko and his partner Daniel Mahru — had rehabbed the 31-unit building in Englewood with a loan from Chicago taxpayers.


Rezko and Mahru couldn’t find money to get the heat back on.


But their company, Rezmar Corp., did come up with $1,000 to give to the political campaign fund of Barack Obama, the newly elected state senator whose district included the unheated building.


That’s the lede. The choicest excerpts have to do with legalistic stonewalling by Obama’s people:

Obama . . .  was associated with the firm for more than nine years, his staff acknowledged Sunday in an e-mail response to questions submitted March 14 by the Sun-Times. They didn’t say what deals he worked on — or how much work he did.


And:

For five weeks, the Sun-Times sought to interview Obama about Rezko and the housing deals. His staff wanted written questions. It responded Sunday but left many questions unanswered. Other answers didn’t directly address the question.

Among these: When did Obama learn of Rezmar’s financial problems? “The senator had no special knowledge of any financial problems,’ Gibbs wrote.

Did the senator ever complain to anyone — government officials, Rezmar or Rezko — about the conditions of Rezmar’s buildings? “Senator Obama did follow up on constituency complaints about housing as [a] matter of routine,’ Gibbs wrote.


Did the senator ever discuss Rezmar’s financial problems with anyone at his law firm? “The firm advises us that it [is] unaware of any such conversations,’ Gibbs wrote.

There is much, much more, from Obama going to work for these people as part of his own ballyhooed war on poverty to his getting a sweet deal from Rezko on his Hyde Park mansion, with lots of donations and fund-raising in between.  The two have been very close.

Obama apparently — hell, obviously — turned a blind eye while Rezko took public money and paid no attention to the buildings that housed, or stored, people in need of so-called affordable housing. Rezko and friends apparently — hell, obviously — took one look at Obama as a black Harvard law star and saw him as marketable.

In the words of Paul Powell of Springfield-looting fame, they smelled the meat a’cookin’. So do a lot of people.

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Carpentersville immigrants

Chi Trib uses both “illegal” and “undocumented” for immigrants without portfolio who live in suburban Carpentersville — six to four in favor of the latter, depending on point of view. 

When referring to the three newly elected or re-elected aldermen who favor the ordinance called the Illegal Alien Immigration Relief Act and its supporters, “illegal” wins.  When people apparently of Mexican origin are discussed, it’s “undocumented.”

I’d like to see a brief explanation why one and not the other.  As it is, we have Trib as split personality.

We also have wooden rhetoric such as one frequently does not find in blogs, for instance, which usually employ a more direct expression. 

Flippancy is there too, of course (as in newspapers), but that’s hardly the goal.  Rather a simple directness.  A copy editor could supply it if a reporter, pulling many things together for a story and in this case two of them, does not.

As for the reporting, I would have liked a response by Carpentersville authorities to a question, not asked, about long-time residents, presumably with clearance from our government, feeling unwelcome.

The response would have fit nicely after this, high up in the story:

“This was pretty bad,” Hilario Savedra, 62, said of Tuesday’s vote, pausing amid a flow of pedestrian traffic at a popular grocery store in the Meadowdale Shopping Center.

“I’ve been in this community for more than 20 years, and I hate to think someone will tell me I’m no longer wanted here. This is my community, too.”

At almost the end of the story, we have this:

Some longtime residents such as Mike Connolly search for middle ground. Carpentersville has plenty of legal Hispanics, and it would be unfair to lump them with the undocumented, he said.

This implies that somebody in Carpentersville is ignoring legality.  But legality is at the heart of the problem.  I think the story could have made that point more clearly, again in no more than a sentence, if that.  And again we look to the copy desk.

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By their surrenders we shall know them . . .

You can take the Democrat out of 1864, but you can’t take military defeatism out of the 2007 Democrat, as James Taranto shows with these two telling quotes:

  • “I believe . . . that this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything, as is shown by the extreme violence in Iraq this week.”–Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, April 19, 2007
  • “Resolved, that this convention does explicitly declare, as the sense of the American people, that after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war, during which, under the pretence of military necessity, or war power higher than the Constitution, the Constitution itself has been disregarded in every part, and public liberty and private right alike trodden down, and the material prosperity of the country essentially impaired, justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view to an ultimate convention of the States or other peaceable means, to the end that at the earliest practicable moment peace may be restored on the basis of the federal Union of the States.”–1864 Democratic platform

25 years murder-free in ‘Gun Town USA’

Heresy it may be to the controllers, but here’s evidence that guns don’t kill, people do, or they don’t when everyone has one:

In March 1982, 25 years ago, the small town of Kennesaw – responding to a handgun ban in Morton Grove, Ill. – unanimously passed an ordinance requiring each head of household to own and maintain a gun. Since then, despite dire predictions of “Wild West” showdowns and increased violence and accidents, not a single resident has been involved in a fatal shooting – as a victim, attacker or defender.  . . . .

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Thanks to Imus from a black guy

K.C. Star sports columnist, who happens to be black (that’s how you say it, right?), has crocodile thank you for the man who used to be from CBS and MSNBC but now should know it doesn’t pay to truckle to Sharpton and friends:

Imus isn’t the real bad guy
Instead of wasting time on irrelevant shock jock, black leaders need to be fighting a growing gangster culture.
By JASON WHITLOCK – Columnist

Thank you, Don Imus. You’ve given us (black people) an excuse to avoid our real problem.

You’ve given Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson another opportunity to pretend that the old fight, which is now the safe and lucrative fight, is still the most important fight in our push for true economic and social equality.

You’ve given Vivian Stringer and Rutgers the chance to hold a nationally televised recruiting celebration expertly disguised as a news conference to respond to your poor attempt at humor.

Thank you, Don Imus. You extended Black History Month to April, and we can once again wallow in victimhood, protest like it’s 1965 and delude ourselves into believing that fixing your hatred is more necessary than eradicating our self-hatred.

The bigots win again. . . . .

Read it all, and hat tip (that’s how you say it, I think) to Just One Minute.