Chicago Daily Observer

The timing could have been better for Salem State College, in Salem, Massachusetts, 21 miles outside Boston. Or, who knows? Maybe the timing couldn’t be better.

The public university pays big bucks to big names for its 26-year-old lecture series. (Speakers have included former presidents—Carter, Bush I, Bill Clinton—major writers—Maya Angelou, Tom Wolfe—major media figures—Walter Cronkite, Thomas Friedman—activists—Jesse Jackson, Gloria Steinem.)

What is important about the John Edwards story…about which we have not heard the end… is not the scandal nor the former presidential candidate lying about it. It’s how the mainstream media sought to protect Edwards by putting a gag on the story-which actually succeeded long after disclosures first came out in 2006…the gag lasting effectively until earlier this month. It goes to the heart of what many Americans are only now beginning to see: Mainstream” media are as biased for liberalism as conservatives say.

Two journalistic liberals now attest to the fact. Howard Kurtz, media critic for The Washington Post last week blasted his mainline journalistic colleagues for trying to snuff out the truth because Edwards is a fellow liberal. He wrote, “the widespread allegations…were an open secret that was debated in every newsroom and reported by almost none.” He was joined by Clark Hoyt, ombudsman for The New ... Read More...

When in 1884 his campaign managers told Grover Cleveland in his Chicago hotel room that things looked bad for his nomination since his opponents had found almost irrefutable evidence that he had sired an illegitimate child and was getting the mother to so attest in the papers, the bachelor candidate, a massive, hulking figure at 250 pounds, standing 5 feet 11 with a huge bull neck, strong jaw, double chin, big fists into whose firm mouth was almost always clamped a cigar protruding under his bushy mustache, said calmly: “Well, gentlemen, you knew when you found me that I was no gelding even though the son of a minister and born in the Presbyterian manse..” A gelding (a word in common usage of the time) was a castrated horse or donkey.

This did not assuage them. What explanation did he have? God knows at age 47 he was a virile ... Read More...

If we can assign theoretical strategies to the top three Democratic contenders, we might say Hillary Clinton is aiming at the Big Bang—winning it all by the first week in March after picking up most of the marbles on Super Dooper Tuesday, Feb. 5.

Barack Obama is playing Smash-and-Grab—hoping to stop Clinton short in the early primaries and caucuses. Say he wins all Illinois and a goodly part of Iowa and California plus a good handful of delegates elsewhere—even gobbles up a chunk of New York. Then he knocks off a bunch of southern states on Super Tuesday where black voters tip the balance, ultimately building a majority by convention time.

This week’s subject, John Edwards, aims to light a fuse by concentrating his far more limited resources in Iowa, where his intensive efforts seem to be paying off. In Iowa he has sometimes led, but minimally stays bunched up ... Read More...