When John Keats wrote “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” he was so enthusiastic that what had always been translated in blank verse was now accomplished in rhyme and so he extolled it in sonnet of iambic pentameter. But the Chapman was George. Our Chapman is Steve, a refugee from the liberal New Republic to the Trib who pretends to be a Deep Thinker but is just another clunker along with Garrison Keillor, both inexplicably appearing each week on the editorial page. Not just a refugee but a liberal mole, Chapman portrays himself as a libertarian but he always manages to strike a blow for the Left with his Op Eds-a sly hoax with which the Trib is complicit.

Last night the effete snob Chapman was on with the self-same Ponce to render his latest column on Sarah Palin to the deadly monotony that is public TV liberalism where all guests echo the same ruminations and Ponce looks as though they have given him some fresh insight. It was the burden of Chapman’s Op Ed that Sarah Palin whom he defiles was a heroine of the Right because she is a looker-whereas poor Harriet Mier was scorned by them because she was not. Now I ask you honestly, was this vapid thought worth contemplating, then writing, then reproducing it at partial public taxpayers’ expense? Of course it is to both Trib and `TTW because Chapman ridicules Palin. See how much good the drumbeat of ridiculing the Right has done the Trib?

To falsify his point, Chapman invents facts and of course no one either in the Trib or on Ponce’s show challenged him. Mistaken fact 1: “…her bungling performance in the 2008 presidential campaign.” The fact is that if there was one bungler on the Republican ticket it was John McCain and that until Palin entered the race it seemed the GOP was going nowhere, having lost its base to ennui. Palin not only electrified the base but in 46 days enabled the ticket, running at a disadvantage with an unpopular war and a recession, to finish only four points under the Trib’s and Chapman’s wunderkind, Barack Obama. Palin debated a 36-year veteran of the U. S. Senate and came off if not the victor, at least equal.

Chapman then goes on the sarcastic to say as do all liberals “no matter how badly she performs.” That’s the same kind of non-rational, no statistics-needed short-hand that has contrived to make Obama a deep-thinker, Reagan an amiable dunce. the Kennedys all intellectuals and Michael Jackson a civil rights leader. As governor, Palin cleaned up Juneau and concluded negotiations for a pipeline that had been hanging uncompleted for decades-all in less than one term while adding heft to the national ticket.

The Tribune is running out of gas and money for good reason. It stands for utterly nothing-barring John Kass-otherwise nothing except phony sophistication for which it will die deservedly since it has nothing to say.

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

image Poet John Keats.  Keats was never a student of Tom Roeser’s at Oxford, as he attended Kings College in London in 1814.