EXTRA: Kirk to get character test in coming days on health issues

I must confess – I gained a significant amount of respect for soon-to-be former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., in recent days.

GIFFORDS: Soon-to-be former



The Congresswoman who was shot in an incident a year ago says she’s giving up her seat on Capitol Hill. She wants to focus her attention on long-term recovery from the gunshot wounds she suffered.

NOW IT’S NOT that I never had objections to Giffords. But it’s just that many political people I have encountered would have gone out of their way to hold onto their political position for as long as humanly possible.

Even if they weren’t capable of fulfilling the duties, they would have wanted to keep the post – which in Giffords’ case would have run through the end of this year and early into January of 2013.

Even if they decided not to run for re-election (which Giffords would have had to do in the Nov. 6 general elections), they wouldn’t have wanted to resign.

Yet that is what Giffords is doing. By the end of Monday, she is to have completed her last duties as a member of Congress from the Tuscon, Ariz., area. She is expected to submit her letter of resignation later this week to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (a Republican) and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.

I’M SURE THERE are Democrats who would have wanted her to stay in office – even though she would be an absentee member – just to keep the congressional seat within the party – instead of boosting by one the Republican majority in the House of Representatives.

It has me wondering how we, in Illinois, would handle the same situation. Which could very well happen if circumstances take a turn for the worse.

KIRK: On road to recovery

Yes, I’m referring to the situation involving Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., who checked himself into suburban Lake Forest Hospital during the weekend and was transferred to Northwestern Memorial Hospital – where on Monday he underwent surgery to relieve swelling around his brain.

He has been diagnosed as having suffered a stroke.

NOW I DON’T have any evidence that this is a life-threatening situation. For all I know, the statement from Kirk’s office that he is expected to recover in full is completely true.

A part of me certainly hopes that he’s being truthful, and can claim to being as noble as Giffords has been in recent days.

But if it turns out for the worst, I’d like to think that Kirk could contemplate making the same high-ground stance as Giffords did. Even if I can already hear the rantings of the Republicans about Pat Quinn “stealing” away a seat from them.

Avoiding that kind of rhetoric may well be the best reason to hope for a full Kirk recovery.

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It’s the guns, stupid!

President Barack Obama is the master orator whose words this week helped soothe the tensions caused by weekend shootings in Tuscon, Ariz., while presidential  dreamer Sarah Palin is the feisty dame whose words know how to fire up her segment of supporters.

DALEY: Getting to the point



Yet leave it to one of the biggest rhetorical stumblebums of the contemporary political scene to get straight to the point of what matters when it comes to the aftermath of those shootings of nearly 20 people, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., that left six dead.

I’M TALKING, OF course, about Richard M. Daley, our long-time mayor who goes off into retirement come May 15.

On the same day that Obama traveled to Tuscon to deliver an address at a memorial service that is being praised for offering comfort to the afflicted and that Palin managed to afflict the comfortable with her mention of the phrase “blood libel” (she doesn’t like all the people who imply her nasty rhetoric has anything to do with the angry mood of our nation these days), Daley had his own thoughts about the issue.

Daley went straight to the point in refusing to blame Palin, or anyone else. For Daley – whose city is actively resisting efforts to make it easy for any resident to purchase a firearm – it’s all about the guns.

“People can shout and say anything they want,” Daley told reporter-types at City Hall. “But they have no right to buy a gun … that has a clip of 15 rounds.”

THAT WAS JUST part of his rant against people who are trying to assess blame against Palin, or other conservative commentators, or any other individual. The man whose home city for nearly 30 years banned possession of firearms by anyone within city limits wants to ignore the commentators who say nasty things and focus on the people in our society who probably should not have access to firearms.

“It’s not the rhetoric,” Daley said. “It’s the right to carry these guns or have guns like this that kill people, and that’s what that individual did.”

PALIN: Get her a better speechwriter



For once in his professional lifetime, Daley hit the hammer on the head – rather than give us a rhetorical stumble (Remember the ‘rat in the sandwich’ line when he was talking about unsanitary restaurants?) that leaves us scratching our heads trying to figure out “What did he mean?”

Perhaps there is something about our local politicos that makes them perceive this issue more clearly. For I couldn’t help but notice that in the initial spurt of public dialogue on Sunday, while many other people were talking about restricting Internet discourse or talk radio rabble, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., was the one person who publicly noted that the gunman in this particular incident had ammunition clips giving him access to 90 rounds – far more than was necessary for anyone to seriously say the pistol was for self-defense.

WE OUGHT TO be having a serious discussion in this country about firearms. But I am aware of the realities of some people in our society who are determined to think that somehow, the ability of a rural man to have a rifle that he uses to hunt will somehow be impeded by restricting the use of a firearm best suited for combat.

I’m also aware that many of those people are in the small segment of the population that takes kindly to the image that the former Alaska governor has crafted for herself. I’m also sure they are the ones who are outraged that the majority of people are now condemning her for her “blood libel” trash talk.

She is trying to claim that people are libeling her with the blood of those killed and wounded in Tuscon – which is a gross overstatement, while also playing off the original use of the phrase. It ties into the old anti-Semitic rants and tales that claimed Jewish people literally dipped their matzos into the blood of dead Christian children on Passover and other significant holidays.

I’m willing to give Palin the benefit of the doubt that she didn’t know that original meaning of the phrase. I know she went to college (several of them, as a matter of fact) and isn’t the stupidest person on the planet, but she also doesn’t strike me as one who has much curiosity about life beyond her specific segment of society – and I don’t expect she knew many Jewish people while living in Alaska.

SHE PROBABLY JUST thought it was a nasty-sounding line she could toss out to get her backers excited.

Considering that her original intent in scheduling an address of any kind on Wednesday (even a video post on Facebook) was to cut into the coverage of Obama trying to calm the nation by appearing at the primary memorial service in Tuscon, I think it only appropriate that her rhetoric backfired on her – and now she gets to take a few hits in return for trying to feed her public persona off the pain being experienced by those in Tuscon.

OBAMA: Did he bring us together?


You just know that in some peoples’ minds, Wednesday set the tone for a potential Obama/Palin presidential campaign in 2012. Obama brings us together, while Palin divides us.

Like I have already written, Daley has zeroed in on the practical reality that this incident ought to be a call for gun control measures to be reviewed. Although I feel I must credit Obama for one moment of inspiration in his own rhetoric.

CITING CHRISTINA TAYLOR Green, the 9-year-old granddaughter of former Chicago Cubs general manager Dallas Green, the president pointed out the accomplishments she achieved in her short life, then said, “I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it.”

That is an inspirational goal we should all strive for.

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EXTRA: Grace Mary Stern handled gag with hard humor that is no longer possible

STERN: Once the top target

There are those people who want to rant against Sarah Palin these days for the fact that her campaign once used a visual graphic on its website of the crosshairs of a riflescope on a map indicating that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., was an official being “targeted” for political defeat.

They’d say the fact that someone this weekend actually shot Giffords is evidence that Palin somehow provoked this.

NOW I’M NOT willing to go that far, although it does make me wonder just how callous political operatives have become in their use of hunting terminology whenever it comes to identifying candidates for defeat. As for those of you who are now complaining that I'm preaching "political correctness" and can't take a joke, all I have to say is , "Shut Up! You're embarrassing yourself."

A political “target” is all too common a phrase. And somehow, I don’t think that any public official would ever again respond to being targeted anymore in the way that one-time state Sen. Grace Mary Stern did many years ago.

Stern, a Democrat from suburban Highland Park who was Adlai Stevenson’s lieutenant governor running mate when he narrowly lost to James R. Thompson in 1982, had managed to get herself elected in the early 1990s to a state Senate seat from the North Shore suburbs.

She managed to defeat incumbent Roger Keats (remember him, the Republican who lost last year for Cook County Board president to Toni Preckwinkle?). She managed to take a legislative post in an upper-income area that back then was regarded as being as hard-core Republican as any place in Illinois could be.

IT LED TO a lot of jokes from political observers about how Stern’s new nickname was “bulls-eye,” on account of the most-definitely serious GOP effort that would be taken to defeat her. Back in the Election Cycle ’94, Grace Mary was Target Number One.

GIFFORDS: Stern tactic now too risky

Stern’s response to such talk was to tape a paper target to her back whenever she was out in public.

I can remember being at the Statehouse during that ’94 campaign season, seeing Stern walking around with this target on her back – drawing attention to herself, while saying it was her way at laughing off the criticisms.

I can also remember on several occasions the sight of young aides on the Illinois House and state Senate Republican staffs (always the male members, I don’t remember female aides doing this) pretending to hold rifles and fire shots at her whenever she walked by them.

IT ALMOST SEEMED humorous back then. But this is a memory that has turned sordid overnight in light of what happened to Giffords on Saturday.

In the end, Republicans got their wish. Stern, along with many other Democratic officials that year, lost that election cycle – and never again held elective office (she died in 1998 from brain cancer). But somehow, her handling of the political gag seems all the more risky now, since we realize it could very easily have been taken grotesquely out of context by someone as equally deranged as the young man who shot Giffords.

It also shows that while Palin likely did not provoke the incident against Giffords, her campaign definitely is guilty of using poor taste when it comes to its campaign rhetoric.

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