The front page of last Sunday’s Chicago Tribune offers readers a point-by-point refutation of Republicans’ linking of Barrack Obama’s performance as a State Senator to the rise in gang violence in Illinois (i.e. if he’s this soft on gang violence how can he handle Al Qaeda?). I counsel abundant patience for those readers still waiting for the Tribune’s front page point-by-point refutation of Democrat accusations that President Bush wanted to put arsenic in your drinking water and Salmonella in children’s hamburgers, or the “if Republicans are elected more Black churches will burn” Democrat ad, or the NAACP’s "It was like my father [James Byrd] was killed all over again" anti-Bush ad.
The Tribune left it to Republican campaigns to refute those (and countless other) absurd charges, so on the Tribune’s own terms, isn’t it the job of the Obama Campaign to answer Republican arguments against the Senator’s candidacy? Well, yes, and that’s why the Trib is answering them. The next logical step is to replace the comical tagline “World’s Greatest Newspaper” with “Obama ‘08” on the Tribune masthead.
