Now comes Forbes magazine, dumping on Chicago as the nation’s third most miserable city. Local loyalty should compel me to come to poor Chicago’s defense, but Forbes didn’t lay it on heavy enough.

City rankings, of course, are total bull hockey; ever since newspapers and magazines discovered computers, they found they could gin up a cheap, but well-noticed story, by slicing and dicing the so-called data to arrive at rankings based on fraudulent methodology.

And one could conclude that the Forbes’ ranking is obviously bogus because it asserts that the nearly comatose Detroit is less miserable than Chicago. Even Forbes seemed surprised when its methodology determined that Chicago was more forlorn than Cleveland.

Not even the election of Chicagoan Barack Obama as president could offset the city’s “lousy weather, long commutes, rising unemployment and the highest sales tax rate in the country…. High rates of corruption by public officials didn’t help either,” the magazine said.

That’s it?

If you ask me, the list should have been longer, much longer.

Topping the list should be Mayor Richard M. Daley. The national media, on the same cycle as the local cicada, can be counted on to regularly rediscover Daley’s existence and bestow upon him honorifics such as  “best mayor in America,” and Chicago as the “nation’s best-managed city.”

Any public official who would launch a midnight sneak attack on a federally funded and highly useful lakefront airport is hardly worthy of “good manager” repute. Tyrant would be more like it. He’s the mayor who lambastes the city’s labor force as a bunch of slackers, while pretending that, as mayor, he has nothing to do with it. He’s the guy who plots to toss $20 billion or more of taxpayers’ and airline passengers’ dollars into an absurd and dangerous plan to expand O’Hare Airport, basically to lag more jobs and contracts to insiders.

Which brings us to the second item on the list that makes Chicago a miserable city: The voters who keep electing the likes of Daley because they think that a “little” graft is a good way to run the place. It’s hardly a “little” graft, unless you count, for example, the $40 million tossed to insiders to rent hundreds of trucks that aren’t used as small potatoes.

Of course, Daley alone doesn’t make us miserable. He gets help from self-interested aldermen who are willing to strangle job generators such as a Wal-Mart store to appease organized labor. Or who rubberstamp the extravagant number of tax increment finance districts that shoot gigantic holes in the city budget, siphoning off tens of millions of dollars that should be going to schools, etc. Let’s not forget the potholes that scar the streets and the CTA, easily mistaken for one of Great America’s scary rides. Also, organized labor’s death grip on the public schools and the convention and exhibition business.

Then there’s Cook County Board President Todd Stroger. And former Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Nothing more needs be said on those matters.

Can’t do much, I supposed, about Chicago’s “miserable” weather, although I submit that it’s no worse than Milwaukee’s, Buffalo’s, Cleveland’s or any of the other cities frequented by the winter hawk that flies off the Great Lakes and into our bones. Chicago’s summers downtown are unbeatable. So is the lakefront. Daley can take credit for Millennium Park, something he believed in with near religious fervor while the town’s cynics ridiculed it for its cost overruns and daring design.

But these do not outweigh the bad. And the troubling thing is, the Forbes’ ratings show that the rest of the nation is beginning to notice. That’s not good for the economy. For every positive that Obama and Oprah bestow on us, increasing attention is paid to our faults. Faults that we could correct, and which can’t blame on the weather.

Here are Forbes’ ten most miserable cities: Stockton, Calif.; Memphis; Chicago; Cleveland; Modesto, Calif.; Flint, Mich.; Detroit; Buffalo; Miami, and  St. Louis.

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Dennis Byrne is a regular contributor to the Chicago Daily Observer and a member of the Editorial Board