Crowding the Mourners’ Bench.

No sooner did Henry Hyde die than the “Tribune” rushed out with a story long on laudatory and very-very short on analysis…topped by the “Sun-Times” which had more of a story. The difference between the two papers is starting to be this-in obit news of the greats, for the sanitized version read the “Tribune” which is like reading the establishment’s official bio; if you want to learn more than he official typescript you read the “Sun-Times.”

Two who crowded the mourners’ bench, burbling their lachrymose tears into their hankies were, predictably, Democratic Congressman Rahm Emanuel who was White House political director for Bill Clinton when Hyde led the House impeachment and the recently resigned (to spend more time with his family, of course) Republican Denny Hastert (good ol’ Denny, his eyebrows waggling up and down, his lips pursed as if to say perhaps major but then thinks better of it).

Now that the dead Hyde can’t contradict, Emanuel said that Hyde was like a friendly mentor to him in the House. (This after Emanuel’s service as White House political director when he had looked heavenward in innocence as Larry Flynt and “Salon” detailed a 40 year old story about Hyde in an attempt to destroy him and the charges of perjury against Bill Clinton. You see, everybody does it!). Warm, greathearted old Uncle Henry put a grandfatherly arm around him and—. (Knowing Henry he’d pull that scrawny neck to his bosom so tightly the ex-ballet dancer couldn’t breathe).

Then the newly-thin Hastert crowded into the pew with his misty-eyed reminiscence that Hyde was-lo and behold-a mentor to him as well when Hastert was in the state legislature.

The “Trib” mentioned nothing whatsoever of any possible connection, even subliminal, between Emanuel and the payback recycled smear on the late congressman. Nor that Hastert refused his fond mentor’s request for an extension of his judiciary chairmanship and then backed a rival to head the House International Relations committee. There is no institutional memory at the “Trib” evidently; not even to remember to look at the Morgue clips or what passes for them these days. It can remember the Flynt charge but nothing else, no Illinois connection. That’s because its Washington staff is largely out-of-town, thus out-of-luck and historically out-of-pocket.

If the “Trib” didn’t have John Kass and Dennis Byrne, well, I dunno what it’d be.

Over at the “Sun-Times,” Chicago smart Lynn Sweet and Abdon Pallasch gave a revelatory précis-echoing the tabloid’s once great coverage of old—of what happened as Hyde prepared the bill of impeachment against Clinton. They interviewed Ab Mikva, former Jimmy Carter-appointed federal judge who was Clinton’s ethics chief in the White House (self-adulated “Mr. Ethics” who like the bordello piano player didn’t fathom what was going on in the anteroom of the Oval Office while his chief was being pleasured by a eager and willing to please taxpayer-paid intern).

Mikva’s job was to water down House impeachment to censure. He told Sweet real historical news: that Hyde originally was favorably disposed to censure but swerved away from that decision after…as Ab said (for the first time I ever read) officially that somebody in the White House orchestrated the leakage of the old affair against Hyde. That’s right: someone in the White House leaked it, Ab said. Never came out before. Great, Lynn! You deserve far more dough than what you obviously must get for that great revelation. And who in the White House…? Aw forget it.

This is all news to the “Tribune” which has much more staff and resources than the “Sun-Times” but is afflicted with corporate journalistic memory that doesn’t extend beyond the day before yesterday. Like when you’re teaching political science and a kid asks “who was Hubert Humphrey?” Makes you want to swat him. And he asks angrily because he’s bored that you are intruding on his precious relevance with today by bringing the name Humphrey up.

But the world cup for vacuous came to me last week. The “Herald” newspaper which covers the northwest suburbs who had someone collecting comments with the tabula raza of somebody who just arrived from Mars. When told the Congressman reflected what few others did-the full nature of the office which goes by the title “United States Representative in Congress” it seemed like fresh news to him but not enough news to print. He copied down the title like it was news to him: United States Repre—.

But here’s the payoff. When told that the Congressman on his retirement, after 32 years in the cockpit of House action from Watergate backlash from Jerry Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan. George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton to George W. Bush, having headed two House committees, was savaged by the White House and blocked by his own Speaker after dealing with the first impeachment of a president since Andrew Johnson and going on to defend a war with Iraq all the while doubting its efficacy…the kid asked brightly—

“A book? On what?”

On gardening, of course.