Report from Chicago, eve of Yearly Kos

Now called Millenium Park, no longer smells like tear gas.

Chicago is such a fine city! O, city of big shoulders, hog-butcher to the world, where I got tear-gassed repeatedly in 1968, and other erotic pleasures. After checking into the hotel today I stashed my car in an underground garage, and rode up in the elevator – only then to realize I was in the lobby of the Prudential Building. Lord, in 1963 I proposed to my true love in the penthouse bar of that very building. She said yes, but, lucky girl, she got away anyway. Must have been the Singapore Slings.

Now, Yearly Kos starts Thursday AM. I hope to be posting daily on what strikes my fancy, so thrills await you. All the good Democrats contending to be the nominee for president will be there, plus our Joe Garcia, Miami-Dade party chairman, who’s a session speaker this weekend, and many Democratic progressives from around Florida, the founders and practitioners of political blogging.

The blog is supposed to be like a diary, so I’m going to whack you with the serendipity that struck me as I drove up I-65 through Indiana this morning. I tuned around the AM dial to find WLS, once my favorite listen. Now, like so many others, it bleats the far-right tune, and Jerry Agar was holding forth when I captured WLS around mid-morning.

Lo, Agar was raving about the Yearly Kos. I was driving and couldn't take notes, but he said we’re all “hard-core leftists,” which equates us to “Communists” in his playbook. Hey, it made me feel like I was back home in South Florida.

Then he and a co-conspirator named Laura, I believe, began ripping into Barack Obama, who’s from Chicago and thus more of a local star/target. They’re still riding the hobbyhorse of his comment about meeting foreign leaders who are on the “axis-of-evil” list, and they were eagerly awaiting the speech he was to give this morning about foreign affairs.

They were going to broadcast it live – at least when it got interesting.

After quite a lot of their prepping with predictions that Obama would put foot in mouth, the senator got into foreign affairs and WLS went live with his voice, just as he described the 9/11 attacks. To my mind, this was not what Jerry Agar had hoped for, since he kept saying Obama was going to declare war on Pakistan; instead, WLS listeners heard at least 10 minutes of Obama’s finely honed and thoroughly logical case condemning the Bush administration for failing to finish the assault on Bin Laden in Afghanistan and launching a disastrous war in Iraq. “What would Barack be willing to pay for all this free airtime on an opposition program?” I wondered. Talk about earned media!

Finally the senator got to what the WLS host was seething for: (I paraphrase Obama’s words) If we have good intelligence on the terrorists and Pakistani President Musharaf refuses to act, I will.

Immediately, Agar said Obama was willing to declare war on Pakistan, to launch an attack on Pakistan. And after he opened the phone lines to callers, he kept saying the same falsity even as the callers said that striking at terrorists in Pakistan wasn’t the same as declaring war on Pakistan.

Well, fellow hard-core lefties, this is what we’re up against. Gross mischaracterization – and shouted as loud and as often as possible.

I took a look at Agar’s bio on the WLS website. Appears he’s done little in life except talk on the radio. Check it out. He has a nice, loud radio voice.

So then, dear friends, I crept through miles and miles of construction sites to reach the hotel in the loop, and I got a copy of the Chicago Sun-Times. Though Rupert Murdoch hasn’t bought that newspaper yet, its Wednesday edition had a wonderful example of what’s known as “fair and balanced” elsewhere in his empire.

Two articles were critical of Obama, and on the other side of the scale, one article slyly praising Fred Thompson for having a young wife. Now I tried to put links up here to the three articles but was unable to find them on the Sun-Times' website. Do computers work differently in the Windy City?

I rest my case for the day. Time to go out and have a look around.