Finally!

For once, the featured letter in the morning's Chicago Tribune didn't make me cringe. It's a nice criticism of the Chicago media's infatuation with Senator Barack Obama. The letter writer points out the elephant in the room- for all the yammer about Obama rejecting "ideology" and being some sort of universally appealing figure, Obama is a resolute big-government statist who would further the erosion of our liberty. And he's right- the media has been so focused on the man's ethnicity and skill with crowd-pleasing platitudes (Mr. Obama approves of hope, apparently) that they seem to keep sliding over his actual beliefs. The writer gets a nice whack in at the supposed goodness of "bipartisanship," too.

If you're not from Illinois, you may not understand why I found this such a breath of fresh air. It seems pretty rare to find any reference to Obama in the mainstream press here that isn't fawning over him. I don't know what the coverage is like in other states, but in Illinois it's absolutely relentless. You can't open the paper without some article or column about how unifying or caring or bipartisan or hopeful or positive or charismatic Obama is. It's like being force-fed cotton candy. Kudos to the Tribune for prominently featuring some dissent.