John Kass Smotes Pat Robertson's Ass -inine Jeremiad

At minimum, once a week, John Kass goes Arepagetican* Greek on some creep.

- A Caliban of a corpulent cop marinated with Happy Cossack gets his booze Botox peeled back for ridicule after tossing a tiny Polish barmaid around while Blackberry armed cowards text the horror.
- An Entitled Patronage Poltroon pries pennies out the tax-payers to fill his swimming pool.
- A daffy Burgomeister wearing an Indiana Jones hat that makes him look like a toad stool with legs gums up the English Language while decrying the sorry state of student test scores

The parade of folly is longer than a Studs Terkel gush segment on WTTW.

Today, John Kass gives America's Brooks Brothers Elmer Gantry - Rev. Pat Robertson - a sound butt-gnawing over the Polecat Preacher Man's moronic exegesis on Haiti's horrible plague of woes.

Pat Robertson, a dedicated hypocrite of the Old School, sees God's Hand in the earthquake that killed tens of thousands of Haitians as recompense for Voodoo.

John Kass cuts to the quick of this slow-hearted opportunist.

It saddens me because Robertson's foolishness once again allows knee-jerk critics of Christianity to use his nonsense to paint countless Christian ministers and priests with the Robertson brush. But they're not in the angry smiting business. They're in the business of love and kindness, not hate and revenge.

I'm clearly no theologian. And the wrath of God against the sinners seems a common thread in the Old Testament.

But has Robertson forgotten about the New Testament, the new covenant, the one that's all about love and caring, even for the sinners?

Mr. Kass, give him one in the jewels before you move on - God told me to tell you that, John. Praise Jesus!



*

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.
As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.
And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play on the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.

John Milton Areopagitica 1644 - A Defense of Free Speech - not moronic mouthings.

'Who's To Say?' Part 2. Maybe John Dewey Should Have Had a Beer with John Kass at Nick's Beergarden.

"nature itself is wistful and pathetic, turbulent and passionate" - John Dewey 1859-1952.

What in the hell does that mean? But then again that is the point. John Dewey is the father of American Public Education, the leading thinker of the American Progressive Movement, one of the leaders of American Psychology, founder of the University of Chicago Laboratory School and the one of the leaders in Nuance.

Dewey was a New Englander and a smart guy who studied the German thinker Hegel. Hegel developed modern thought based upon the notion that Germans were smarter than Italians, Spaniards, Frenchmen and Arabs. Hegel and his buddy Schopenauer developed Dialectical Materialism, which gave Karl Marx something to write about in the dusty stacks of the British Museum developed the notion of class warfare as the new parousia(παρουσία) , or Second Coming.

John Dewey took a job at Rockefeller's swell new school south of Canaryville's Stockyards - The University of Chicago - and established himself as the leader in the Pragmatist Movement begun by William James. Pragmatism is rooted in the empiricists of the 18th Century and candied up with the Romantics and the Dialectical Materialists of the 19th Century. Two Dollar words for 'if you can't really see it, give it a pass.'

This is a nice way of killing off any metaphysics - the stuff you can't see: Faith, Belief, Trust, Compassion, Piety, Fidelity all that nonsense. E.G. 'Were any of us, really, in the cell with John McCain? Can we be actually certain that he was, in fact, a prisoner? Honor?' or how about 'What is an Unrepentant Terrorist? Bill Ayers we all know IS a "Distinguished Professor of Education" so why is this an issue?'

John Dewey, who it seems, died a few months before I was born, it appears, influenced the use and application of 'Who's to say?'

'Who's to say?' is the means by which a shared belief can be kicked to death. It is also the advent message for all bad, worthless, tasteless, obscene, and dangerous idiots to have their time in the spotlight. How else might one explain the development of Reality TV and Bill Maher?

Aristotle influenced Christian ( Aquinas), Jewish (Maimonides), and Muslim ( Averroes/Avicenna)thinkers who have helped people make sense of our lives through an understanding of an Ordered and Unified Universe. Faith, Belief in Universal Truths and all that stuff that Dewey and the smart guys killed off - or tried to - is reflected in an Absolute ( God/Higher Power/Big Banger/Truth).

No less an Aristotelian than Chicago Tribune's John Kass gave us an exercise in a long over-due return to sense over Dewey with a brilliant essay called to my attention by Saloon Keeper/Coach/Jazz Historian and Snappy Dresser Nick Novich*.

'Kass wrote the most stirring caveat to Americans with his essay on capturing Wild Pigs. Read it, Hickey!' I had in fact missed that one. Here is Kass, discussing one of those metaphysical terms 'Liberty" - Kass as metaphysician answering the 'Who's to Say?-ers' and John Dewey-

Fear happens. The 9/11 terrorist attacks happened, and the federal government—always eager to extend its reach—built its massive security bureaucracy, down to those spy cameras installed on the streetlights of so many cities and towns, thrilling America's mayors and the police chiefs. We're told the cameras keep us safe. We've become used to the eyes.

And when the economic crisis happened—when the credit bubble burst and the excesses of Wall Street caught up with us, and so many people lost their jobs and their retirement savings got whacked, and they started losing their homes—naturally people became fearful.

When you're worried about your family, you're not interested in the history of blame. You're interested in keeping a roof over their heads. You're interested in solutions. The solution so many want these days is more government.

Some of that is a proper demand for reasonable regulations on the markets and on lending that were eased during the Clinton years and continued. But today's crisis has also led to the massive federal bailout of the financial industry, with Washington picking who wins and who loses. We're told that this arrangement is only temporary. But partnerships involving almost a trillion dollars that grant even greater leverage to Washington have a way of becoming quite terribly permanent.

So the leviathan grows, and the bureaucrats and the corporate types attached to this bailout deal see the world in strikingly similar terms. They share the same type of mind and they share the common purpose of maintaining the status quo. Why wouldn't they? They're on the inside.

The casualty will be the entrepreneurs, those on the outside, the ones who create the spark and offer up the products or the ideas that fire the economy. The entrepreneurial mind isn't willing to settle and wants to make more than $250,000 in salary or whatever the federal government deems proper. They don't want proper. What they want is to take risks and reach the American Dream.

Such men and women will be on the outside for decades now. When they get close to victory they'll get whacked with tax increases and the rug will be pulled out from under them. The rich will have their wealth. But new entrepreneurs will be hamstrung and without that creative spark, no government-administered economic system can survive. History has taught us this over and over again.

The bailout happened so quickly we haven't fully considered the effects. Will we recognize America 40 years from now? How long before we understand how fundamentally America has changed? What kind of generational conflicts will this new government market policy instigate? Will our children speak of liberty, as we once did before we forgot?

These days, liberty isn't in vogue. It's so, so olde. We forget to consider liberty as America's founders conceived it—as one of the rights given us by God. Liberty was something an entrepreneur could understand. But even before this economic crisis Americans were given a new word from the corporatist/bureaucrat dictionary: empowerment.

"Empowerment" kinda, sorta evokes liberty but not really, since "empowerment" is something a government confers upon its people (or its serfs) when government decides the serfs (people) are ready.

While writing this I received one of those chain e-mails, but this one wasn't about a politician or the widow of the Nigerian oil minister. It was about how to catch wild pigs. I don't know if you could actually catch wild pigs this way, but it really doesn't matter. In this method, you throw bucketfuls of corn on the forest floor. The pigs eat the corn. A month later you put up one side of a fence and more corn. Eventually, the pigs return, get used to the fence and keep eating. And another side of fence and more corn and so on, until you close the gate and you've caught the pigs. They've lost their freedom. They can't figure out what's happened.

We're not pigs, we're Americans, rightfully worried about the economic future. But the times are changing, and the Boomers should consider the costs and consequences of what they're being offered by our politicians before the last side of the fence goes up. ( emphasis my own)
jskass@tribune.com

Boomers ( broadly, to be sure) are 'Who's to Say?' Dewey Devotees. Kass and other close-knit ethnic types who share the traditions of Faith and Culture deconstructed by the Progressive Deweyites give us a great opportunity to examine the agendas behind the people who demand a a rhetorical answer to 'Who's to say?'

Well done, Brother Kass.



*

Nick Novich is proprietor of many great neighborhood watering holes in this wonderful city.

http://www.nicksbeergarden.com/

Obama/Ayers in Medias Res by John Kass Today!

The incomparable John Kass, the only wide-awake journalist at Chicago Tribune, does a great job of explaining the Obama/Ayers symbiotic relationship - I used symbiotic for all you fans of Lefty neologisms ( which translates to real people as 'snotty BS').

Ayers and Obama are as tight as teenagers with a powerful crush and their parents on a mutual weekend in Vegas. 'We trust them alone together; they've gone to Great Schools!'

However, the Greek Mencken of Chicago still needs to get to the root (radical) act of this relationship - Who Hired Ayers at University of Illinois Chicago and who sent the domestic terrorist with his plenary indulgence for past and future acts?

Read John Kass:

But the reason Ayers is not a big deal in Chicago has to do with the Chicago Way, and the left fork of that road that has been bought and paid for by the Daley machine, subsidized by taxpayers who foot the bill for public relations contracts from City Hall.

The new Daley machine is much more sophisticated than his father's. And the stereotype of knuckle-draggers and wiseguys—they're still around, and there are jobs on the city payroll for those who work the precincts.

Yet what's often ignored is that their university-educated cousins get city contracts to spin the news and shape the symbolism and tell out-of-town reporters that Ayers is no big deal. They won't bite the hand that feeds them. For an examination of the Daley spin machine—and its cost to taxpayers—please see Tribune reporter Dan Mihalopoulos' story in the Sunday editions.

One friend of Obama and Ayers is former '60s radical Marilyn Katz, now an Obama fundraiser, strategist and public relations maven. She's often a go-to quote for reporters to knock down the Ayers-Obama story.

"What Bill Ayers and [former Black Panther, now U.S. Rep.] Bobby Rush . . . did 40 years ago has nothing to do with [the presidential campaign]," Katz was quoted as saying in the Chicago Sun-Times in April. "[Ayers] has a national reputation. He lectures at Harvard [University] and Vassar [College]."

What that story and many other pro-Obama articles gloss over is that during the violent protests of the 1968 Democratic National Convention here, Katz was the security chief for the radical Students for a Democratic Society. She once advocated throwing studded nails in front of police cars, back in the SDS days when the group was alleged to have thrown cellophane bags full of human excrement at cops and cans of urine and golf balls impaled with nails.

How things change.

Under this Daley, her firm, MK Communications, has many city deals, and one involves public relations for the Chicago Police Department's community policing program. From nails to contracts, the Chicago Way. Apparently, irony was not a '60s thing.

Now, as Daley prepares to lay off more than 1,000 city workers, he's given Katz and other public relations firms five-year contracts that could pay them as much as $5 million each for consulting, advertising and promotion.

Getting in good with Daley hasn't been bad for business. She also lists as her clients Daley's Chicago Housing Authority, Daley's City Colleges, Daley's city Law Department, and Daley's Departments of Aviation, Environment, Housing, Human Services, Planning and Development, Public Health, Public Works, Streets and Sanitation, Intergovernmental Affairs, Special Events—the list goes on.

Clearly, if she wasn't a good soldier for Shortshanks her list of clients would be quite small. Katz is often aggravating, but she's also funny and smart, so I called her to submit my theory: That by buying off the political left—through PR contracts to Katz, through his own support for Ayers—Daley maintains control over message and symbolism.

"I don't see it that way," said Katz. "As kids, our issues were schools, the environment, housing—and these things are the same things that the mayor cares about. So we have this in common. The agendas that drove us pulled us together. It's about respect for each other's point of view, not what we did when we were 19."

On Ayers and Obama, Katz still insists it isn't a story.

"Bill and I were in different parts of SDS. We disagreed on tactics. Bill has spent his entire life contributing to the betterment of society. That's all I can say about Bill," she said.

Happily, I beg to differ. Ayers is a terrorist—the narcissistic son of privilege and clout—whose father, Thomas, was the boss of Commonwealth Edison and a friend of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley. As a leader of the ultraviolent Weather Underground, Ayers admitted to helping bomb the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon in the 1970s. He should have been sent to prison. Instead, Chicago political clout allowed him and his wife, fellow radical Bernardine Dohrn, to magically join the payrolls of universities here.

Obama says he was 8 years old when the bombs went off. But he was a grown man when he sought Ayers' political blessing, and when they worked on the same education projects.

"They're friends. So what?" Mayor Daley said in August.

He's the boss and the master spinner. So it must not be a story.

jskass@tribune.com

Mr. Kass - Da Machine Answers Yer Charges, Mug! - En Ballade Quatrain

'Let Me Be As Clear as Possible - or 'I'll Say This Again!'

Mount Carmel don't play football;
'N Leo Don't Run Track;
Da Mayer's On Da Level;
Yo,Kass, Get Off Our Backs.

Spring Don't Precede Summer;
'N Cars don't Run on Gas;
Palin Brings Home Real Blubber;
Kass, You Jus Distracts!'!

McCain is an Ol' Hipppie:
Barack is 'Being Clear;'
Ayers was not a Bomber:
Kass, Ged Oudda Here!

Da Sox Got Ample Pitchin:'
Da Bears Got Ample Line:
Dis City's on Da Level;
Obama's Clock Don't Wind.

Da Media Plays As Square As
Da Indy 500 Track.
Medill School Trained Inkslingers
Don't Scratch Obama's Back.

Jesus Was A Activist;
'N Pilate was a Guv.
Give Barack His Propa's
You Racist Right Wing Bum!

Rezko's Not in the Slammer;
Daley Don't Heart the Bean;
Chicago's On The Level
John Kass is Just Too Mean!

Cowboy Blago: Not Duke - He's From 'Blazing Saddles!' and certainly not the Guv.

John Kass is correct - there is a combine and Gov. Blago is no John Wayne. But just who might the Haircut that Talks be from the wonderful world of the movies?

BoingKKKKKK! Blazing Saddles!!!! Nope not Hedley LaMarre; Not Mongo; not Lily Vpn Schtuppe; not Governor LePetomane!

Blago is Lyle - Mr. Taggert's evil and racist henchman with the great hair!

Pictured above singing 'Camptown Ladies' with verve and bounce!

John McCain: Chicago's John Kass Warns of Obama's Hopium Distribution

The best Chicago writer since Finley Peter Dunne introduced Mister Dooley to Americans, John Kass, warns of the spreading Hopium Addiction -MSM 40 Watt news readers and surfer-dude slackers are not the only victims, Republicans have long been Hope-heads, but they tend to suffer silently - enabled by friends and common country clubs. MoveOn.org is really slinging the stuff, it seems.

"I never thought it could happen to me," says a shaggy blond-haired surfer dude in the ad, a guy who should have carried a bong.

"I've been living with it for a while now," says a young woman, talking as if she'd contracted a sexually transmitted disease.

That's how they discuss hopium. Like a disease. But they have nothing to be guilty about. It's not some disease that cranky old Republicans can't get because they stopped having sex.

It's hopium.

Click my post title for more Kass on Hopium!

John McCain: Wright's Wrongs - Words, No Biggie; Deeds,Might Be Getting Scrutiny

The great John Kass of the Chicago Tribune voices concern over Rev. Jeremiah Wright's mockery of everyone 'different' from him - and that includes the young man that he brought to Jesus.

Wright is doing 'the dozens' on America. As I did in my recent post on the chic Stanley Fish - salon buddy of Bomber Billy Ayers, may I offer some context:

Here's 'The Dozens:'

The dozens is a game, especially common among urban blacks, of exchanging insults usually about the mother of the opponent. Skilled playing of the dozens displays verbal improvisation of great originality and wittiness. It also requires a thick skin: you lose the contest if you get upset. The game is often in a stylized, rhythmic form, and the dozens are considered one of the precursors of rap music. Some excellent examples of the dozens can be seen in the movie White Men Can't Jump.

The term dozens is usually used in such phrases as "to play the dozens" or "to do the dozens"; the form dirty dozens is also common. The word dates at least to the 1910s, but the game was probably played considerably earlier. There are examples of this type of game in several other cultures; in sixteenth-century Scotland, a flyting was a battle between poets who exchanged abusive poems; and in the late ninteenth century, American cowboys engaged in "cussing contests," where a saddle would be awarded to the most abusive participant.

The origin of the term is unknown. Some conjectures include: it refers to a throw of 12 in craps, 12 being a difficult number to match; the original form had twelve verses, each one referring to a different sex act; and that inferior slaves were sold in lots of twelve, the number twelve therefore coming to mean 'wretched; inferior' itself. None of these hypotheses has any solid proof, and the origin is likely to remain a mystery.

Some other terms for this type of stylized insulting are capping, jiving, joaning (or joning), sounding, snapping, and signifying.

http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=19960903

John Kass illustrates Wrights casting the dozens at the NAACP address that got the ball rolling over Obama.

"If you got some white friends, they'll be clapping like dis, y'all," sang Wright, mimicking bad white clappers, loudly and to much applause, on tape, at the NAACP dinner Sunday night.

At first, I thought it was from HBO's "Def Comedy Jam," in which white people are often ridiculed for bad dancing or pathetic sexual prowess or lack of accomplishment in athletic contests.

But on the wall behind Wright was the NAACP logo, so it wasn't a comedy show. It was a serious event. Amen, reverend.

White folks are a scream! We are a race of fat goofy, greedy bankers, roped off in the lobby of Washington Mutual and Garlic Nosed Legionaries of the 3rd Marines nailing down Jesus, but can't dance. Gene Kelly, my Aunt Fanny!

Accompanied with a cadre of angry black preachers and their bodyguards, Wright played to his core constituency with deep and abiding anger. His anger extends to Barack Obama, it seems to me, and indicated that Rev. Wright might not welcome his notoriety, nor especially the millions of eyes now cast upon his operations as pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street.

Wright detestation of America seems genuine enough given the strident game of 'the dozens' he is currently playing.

Play is a two way street. Journalists, other than Bill Moyers, and government agencies just might be taking a careful look at Pastor Wright's ministry. Given the fact that Trinity received millions of dollars from the government that Wright so hates, the game of 'the dozens' might have a genuine smack of Old Timey Irony. Those Faith Based Initiatives are written in stone, concrete, wrought iron and hard dollars.

Click my post title for John Kass.

John McCain: It Sure Looks Like There's A Lot of Sunshine on Obama's Underground Man

Chicago's best writer newspaper columnist since Finley Peter Dunne, Chicago Tribune's John Kass blows more sunshine on Senator Barack Obama's ties to domestic terrorist Billy Ayers. More importantly, Kass floods Billy Ayer's bolt-hole from Underground Man to Distinguished Professor at University of Illinois -Chicago Campus by asking the tweedy partisans just how an unrepentant bomber of America got a job in the first place.

A few years later, Ayers got his job as a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. And Dohrn was employed at the Children and Family Justice Center affiliated with Northwestern University's School of Law.

I've always been fascinated as to how the radical underground stop running and get jobs in academia. Is there a Terrorist Patronage Office for Rich White People? And how did a convicted Dohrn get hired to teach at a law school?

"I am afraid I don't know an answer to that," NU spokesman Alan Cubbage said. "The person who was the dean at the time is no longer with the law school. And the person who was the president at the time is no longer the president. So I just don't know."

Cubbage did not mention that Ayers' late father—Commonwealth Edison boss Thomas Ayers—was an NU trustee and former board chairman. UIC spokesman Mark Rosati couldn't help either, but suggested I file a Freedom of Information Act request to find out how terrorists get hired by taxpayers.

"It's nothing personal," Rosati said.

How amusing. They don't want to explain how terrorists were hired, so they know nothing.

It might work now, but it won't work in the fall, when Broadway Baby opens for a run, in a campaign commercial near you.

Nothing personal. Mark, I take the weather personally. I have a warm and fuzzy feeling that John Kass just loves a snotty crack from an Ivory Tower aparatchik. Expect a journalistic tune-up shorty. Nothing personal - business - the Nation's business.

Click my post title for more from the great John Kass.

John McCain: Meet John Kass!

Today's Reuters piece reports that John McCain feels that Americans are too cynical - really? Sorry- comes with being a life-long smart-ass and punching bag. And there in lies the rub; I make a crack and expect one in kind. Not so, too many very loud Public voices in Cable TV, Print and especially on Talk Radio. Say anything - no consequences.


Senator John McCain at 71 years of age and five of those years being tortured with great regularity, is sprinting around the country, while a bloated fop on MSNBC- The Tool Shed, Keith Olbermann makes cracks about his age and lifetime of service.

"But when healthy skepticism sours into corrosive cynicism our expectations of our government become reduced to the delivery of services. And to some people the expectations of liberty are reduced to the right to choose among competing brands of designer coffee."

Olbermann and his androgynous twin Rachel Maddow make a point of sneering at Honor, Service and Commitment, because they were spawned by the forces of indulgence and self-satisfaction.

Not so, Chicago Journalist, Columnist, wit and 'fly-in-the-ointment' that greases Illinois public corruption, The Chicago Tribune's John Kass. John McCain would have no difference of sentiment from John Kass - identical values it seems to me. From Wikpedeia - My C-Minus Intellect's Canon of Facts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kass

John Kass is a Chicago Tribune columnist.

The son of a Greek immigrant grocer, Kass was born June 23, 1956, on the South Side of Chicago and grew up there and in Oak Lawn, IL. He held many jobs - retailer, ditch digger, waiter - before becoming a student of film at Columbia College in Chicago. There, he worked in the student newspaper and gained the attention of Daryle Feldmeir, president of the media department and previous editor of the Chicago Daily News. Feldmeir and media professor Les Brownlee helped Kass to obtain an internship at the Daily Calumet in 1980, where Kass worked as a reporter until he left for the Tribune.

Kass lives in the southern suburbs of Chicago with his wife and twin children.


[edit] Style of Writing
Kass uses his bully pulpit to rail against corruption in government and highlight the impact of corruption on taxpayers. In September 2003, he wrote about Federal indictments handed down in a scandal involving city contracts. Kass wrote, "what drives the criticism is the obscene amounts of taxpayer dollars that go to [Mayor Daley's] pals. In deal after deal after deal, the attitude is that his guys can take what they want and the people in the neighborhoods better shut up about it, while higher taxes put more and more pressure on families to pay for the deals."[1]

Kass often writes nostalgically about Chicago's bygone days. He describes one of Chicago's famous steakhouses by writing, "[Gene and Georgetti's] is a hangout where information is traded, among politicians, insiders, reporters, wise-guys, salesmen, consultants, from the buttoned down to the gold chains crowd. And what makes it work is that they serve the best steak in the city, period. The service is impeccable without being showy and the drinks are honest. Gene's is a part of the old Chicago, the city as it was before so much of the downtown was turned into a theme park."[2]

A frequent target for Kass is Richard M. Daley, the long-time Mayor of Chicago. Kass once wrote, "Investigations into massive affirmative-action contract fraud and the Hired Truck scandals, and a series of convictions have pressured the mayor and his inner-circle, who, when it came to cronyism and contracts, once behaved as if they were untouchable. Now, the mayor has jumped on the reform bandwagon, at least publicly, frantically offering good-government initiatives, even as the feds bore in on the source of his absolute power: His patronage armies that dictate politics and policy on the local, state and federal levels, electing his favored candidates, but also crushing those he doesn't like, getting rid of them in party primaries."[3]

In his columns Kass is a frequent critic of what he terms as the "combine" of Illinois politics, wherein powerful elements of the Illinois Republican and Democratic parties unite for the purposes of political corruption.

Kass also writes about lighter topics, particularly beer can chicken.
Kass's column appears on page 2 of the Tribune's news section.

John Kass goes out of his way to pin-prick the vanities of public men and women whose public actions indicate that they feel somehow above the Law and those they were elected to serve. Kass is the best Chicago Public Writer since Finley Peter Dunne, who invented the 'Public Persona' style of writing with his character Mr. Dooley. Only the Chicago Tribune's Daniel B. McGrath, the Sports Editor, is Kass's superior in crafting simple declarative sentences. Dan McGrath is recognized nation-wide as a great sports writer. Writer indeed,

John Kass is no cynic - far from that group of wily Greeks who used words to circumvent the Law and even Ethics.

Kass is locked to ethikos - what ought to be. The Romans touted morals ( mores - customs or traditions, the Greeks locked ethics into Man. John Kass does not give - in Chicago terms - a 'fat rat's ass' about niceties or politically correct boondoggles. Like Dryden, Swift, Pope, Thackeray, Twain, and Mencken, Kass roots out the deeds that make life miserable for most of us.

Senator John McCain, meet John Kass.

Senator McCain worries that,

"Many Americans are indifferent to or cynical about the virtues that our country claims," the former Vietnam prisoner of war will say.

In part, he says, it is because some have suffered economic dislocations while others profit as never before, and in part, it is a "reaction to government's mistakes and incompetence and to the selfishness of some public figures."

He comes close to calling some Americans spoiled, saying they are cynical because "the ease which wealth and opportunity have given their lives led them to the mistaken conclusion that America, and the liberties its system of government is intended to protect, just aren't important to the quality of their lives."

Senator, point to John Kass and more of us will get things right.

Free Mike Mette! Click My Post Title and Sign Petition to Governor of Iowa

Last year, Judge Monica Ackley sentenced Chicago Police Officer Michael Mette to five years in prison for the crime of defending himself from a drunken lout with Dubuque political clout after repeated attempts by Officer Mette to disengage from confrontation.

The Chicago Tribune's John Kass* is the only Chicago Newspaper Professional to take up his cause. Other so-called journalists, who hleped make Chicago a Thug Comfort Zone by shilling for radical Leftiest lawyers and active Gang-bangers, ignored a true story of injustice.

Here is what John Kass wrote in his January 4, 2008 piece:

The Mette family also wrote letters to Illinois politicians, and the captains of clout turned away. Illinois Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan (D-Daddy will make her governor) and U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-the powerful one) told Mette's family they couldn't get involved.

Meanwhile, the drunk who attacked Mette is fine, an excellent golfer and apparently still partying it up, although the drunk did get a DUI after Mike's hometown conviction in Dubuque.

And Mike? He began serving his sentence in the fall and spent Christmas and New Year's behind bars, sentenced to 5 years for throwing that one punch, according to the sentencing judge's ruling.

Chicago Police Officers, their families and their neighbors have tried repeatedly to get gutless politicians to act on Mike Mette's behalf, other than Cook County States Attorney Dick Devine none have even indicated a scintilla of interest in Mike's case - Self Interest seems the first Rule of Politicians. Aside from Dick Devine the other 'big names' in politics went to ground. Shameful. Gutless. Typical.

Call on the Governor of Iowa, Chet Culver - sign the petition. Send a message. Free Mike Mette!

* ABC's TV Reporter Chuck Goudie did a great job of bringing this story to light.


Huge hat Tip to Second City Cop, Second City Sarge and Leo Memorial for keeping this Injustice to Mike Mette in the Public Eye - well done, Officers!

John MCain:John Kass Chicago's Best Voice in Journalism

I've had beefs with John Kass. Heavens.

'Hickey thinks ill of my positions, I sha'nt sleep!'

How a political hors d'ourve, like Angelo Torres, or a main course like George Ryan gets gutted by John Kass's prosaic saw-knife has bumped my ire at times. I believe that friends in need - people who have displayed genuine kindness or concern in personal matters - must and should have my public support. Judy Topinka, nice enough woman, lost me when she ditched Ryan when he became political plutonium along with too many others.
That should not be done.

My greatest level of affection for Harry Truman is rooted in his attendence at Kansas City Political Machine Boss Tom Prendergast's funeral. Harry did not give a good God Damn about the consequences. That is also why I gravitate to John McCain.

John Kass has a job to do and that is to report, comment upon and pound home to readers violations of the public trust. Kass does that well.

Today, John Kass gives a brilliant insight to the McCain Victories in the Super Tuesday Primaries - Here in Illinois, McCain dominated. Illinois people gravitate to people who are good people. John Kass has penchant for knoting some good people into a political construct he calls 'The Combine.' I am too simple for that. I see people as I meet them and encounter their actions for other people. Kass is brilliant and I tend to be a dope. He's smarting me up some though. He may smarten up some really sophisticated people who think and live in doctrinaire cocoons. He might smarten them up enough to devlop a point of view that meets and encounters actions performed by a Man like John McCain for all Americans.


Here's a morsel of some great prose by Kass from today's John McCain piece:

Conservatives can't move forward until they figure out where they stand. And that battle, to define conservatism, is where all this anti-McCain vitriol erupts from.

Conservatives limp along, a disorganized movement, in part because they supported President Bush, who was not a conservative, yet was made one by the party mouthpieces. And, yes, I drank the Kool-Aid too.

Eat some more!
Click my post title for Kass on McCain

John McCain - Chicago's Best Writer Since Finley Peter Dunne, John Kass, Tells Conservatives to Get With McCain!

This photo shows John Kass being interviewed by FOX Chicago News after the guilty verdict came down on Gov. George Ryan. I thought Kass to be especially hard on George Ryan, but he was motivated by the the deaths of six children.

Other journalists, who had made careers of kissing Governor Ryan's fanny, were much more vicious - as cowards always tend to be. Kass, with whom I disagree three days a week (which does not deprive him of sleep to be sure), is the best political writer since Finley Peter Dunne. Kass gets it right the other four days.


Today, one of the four, John Kass, the absolute best Chicago voice often compared to Mike Royko, chides Conservatives - especially GOP Righties - to stop bashing John McCain.

John Kass, who personally sticks his head into the issue of corruption in Illinois and who has been threatened by some of his targets, is a much better writer than Royko - Kass is the best Chicago political writer since Finley Peter Dunne, the creator of Mr. Dooley, and only bested for pure prose by his Chicago Tribune colleague, Sports Editor Dan McGrath.

Click my post title for John Kass on John McCain.