News from the political front

Red rabbit's been down with the flu, and Lenora's in the throes of exams, so I thought I might divert our readers by directing them to Andrew Stephens's article in the New Statesman, Obama Unmasked, which, while it includes no new reporting, draws attention to how little attention the media in general have devoted to the questions that the Chicago Tribune and the Sun-Times have raised about Obama's slick and misleading strategy of self-presentation.

Quoth Stephens:

The further away you get from Chicago, though, the more the saintly image takes hold. Publications like the New Yorker may coo for pages over "the conciliator", but the two Chicago newspapers are much more interested in Obama's close 17-year friendship with Antoin "Tony" Rezko, a long-time Obama donor and property developer awaiting trial on charges of attempted extortion, money laundering and fraud. A low-income housing project received more than $14m from taxpayers while Obama was a state senator, but he consistently denied that he had done any favours for Rezko.

All of this would matter little if there were some truly progressive politics being furthered by the self presentation, but alas . . .