Folksy liberal Edward McClelland who writes the Channel 5 NBC blog Ward Room is filled with unsolicited sucker advice for the Illinois GOP. My question: Ed, anent your helpful suggestions to the GOP, when was the last time you voted for one of its candidates? Was it 2008 for McCain? 2004 for Bush? 2000 for Bush? I thought not.

Anyhow he just got up yesterday morning and decided to give the party a lot of gratuitous and unsolicited advice. This is from the same outfit that told Mark Kirk it wasn’t interested in getting any more news releases disparaging Giannoulias about the mobster loans he made from his family’s bank.

McClelland’s free-for-nothing advice: Republicans don’t need to court the right. In other words: skip the Fox Network Glenn Beck-Andrew Breitbart session scheduled here. Kirk is going but then I’m not surprised. Brady isn’t going either—by which I am surprised. If anybody needs recognition from the base aside from downstate, it’s him.

Of course McClelland’s “advice” is duplicitous. The first rule in politics is to energize one’s base. The base of the GOP is resolutely conservative. And to capitalize on an energized base, a candidate should show his/her face and identify with it. Fox has the most TV watchers and its commentators rank with the most popular in the nation. Beck’s viewers rank into the millions and is the fastest growing commentator in the U. S. now. Breitbart is close to joining the same league.

Already another would-be Republican well-wisher, Capitol Fax has hectored Republicans to stay away: All this advice for the good of the GOP, you know. Gene McCarthy used to say that most newsies hang together like blackbirds on a telephone wire. One settles on it and is soon joined by a flock. Talk about Journ-a-List and its litany of anti-GOPers: In this Squid state where 90% of journalists either belong or are straight Dem voters, Journ-a-List isn’t needed. They just think the same without corresponding with each other. Did you ever hear Carol Marin talk so warmly of “Jimmy” Warren, the ex-Trib editor who now purveys his liberalism to The New York Times two days a week (Friday and Sunday) via a special foundation grant and good old WTTW-TV?

Capitol Fax thinks it odd…and is compelled to tell its readers this…that Bill Brady attended a fund-raiser here in town for Sharron Angle the GOP Senate nominee opposing Nevada’s Harry Reid, the majority leader. Oh-oh-oh, Brady: Mustn’t do! Sharron Angle is a…gasp…conservative! A far-right nut, don’t you understand? Memo to Capitol Fax: She’s tied with Reid in the latest CBS poll. I really get a kick out of these trembling media Democrats who want to spare Republican candidates “embarrassment” with the so-called “moderates.” BS. They want Republicans to placate the Left.

As if the Left would ever vote for Brady.

And lookie here, another faux GOP “adviser,” Bernie Schoenberg, a columnist for the Springfield Journal-Register has already flown in to take a spot on the telephone wire with McClelland and Capitol Fax. Schoenberg cares very deeply about Republican welfare too so he’s issuing his own advice.

What it is, is less of advice than a media threat. Don’t attend this meeting, do you get it? But just to soften it a bit so that it seems like friendly advice, McClelland says “Republicans don’t need to be seen with Beck and Breitbart any more than Democrats need an endorsement from Rachel Maddow and Michael Moore.” The analogy is inept. Lesbian outer Maddow is far less known than any Fox contributor and she’s on the slightly watched MSNBC. Aside from producing a film every few years of so that intrigues The Daily Kos, Moore is not well known.

So understand this: The supposedly “friendly” advice is duplicitous. But it also carries an implied threat to Republicans. Meaning obviously, if candidates show up they’ll be fodder for Schoenberg’s liberal-slanted columns in the future.
Just a few words of friendly advice…or threats…from our collegial lefty media folks who have so distinguished themselves in the past for dissing Republican candidates and issues. Don’t kid yourself, like blackbirds sitting on a telephone wire as purported “friends with advice” to the GOP they are…and as November 2 approaches, first one and then the flock will fly away to vote for and write in behalf of Squid candidates. They’ll do an “agonized recapitulation” and wind up supporting Quinn and Giannoulias.

Count on it.

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Tom Roeser is the Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Chicago Daily Observer