The Clarion Call

It’s summertime and the living is easy, but the writing is hard. This morning (a day late for this weekly column already) I was surfing around the Internet and stumbled onto a web site called Clout City: Chicago’s Political Blog.

I started reading a blog post about how Mayor Daley had received an environmental award (funded by Wal-Mart no less) for his work with the”Greening of Chicago.” This led to a lively discussion about corruption in the Windy City, Wal-Mart’s role in the coming Chinese dominance of the world and the theory that global warming is really being caused by all those people on the Tibetan Plateau!

In the middle of all that, I came across The Political Hack’s Playbook which I reproduce verbatim below. (Except for a few nitpicking copy changes. Old habits die hard!)  See if it doesn’t explain a lot of what’s been going on around here . (Hey, it beats having to write my own column this week!)

“1) If telling the truth HELPS you, tell the truth. (however rarely this is true for an incumbent).

2) If telling the truth HURTS you, tell a lie, particularly a lie that is impossible to prove is a lie.

3) When lying, coat your lies with as much truth as possible, so the lie APPEARS to be true.

4) When confronted with your lies, vigorously assert that you’re NOT lying and accuse those who say you are, OF LYING.

5) Avoid lying about things that can be PROVEN to be lies, though, you can ALWAYS challenge the honesty of those who present the proof of your lies.

6) Do your very best to keep some sort of track of your lies, so you don’t waste energy lying when you are confronted with conflicting lies.

7) Whenever possible, always have OTHERS lie for you, so you can denounce them, if and when they are caught lying. When caught in a lie, change the subject and focus on telling those lies that have, so far, not been proven to be lies.

9) Tell the truth sparingly, because, if the truth were helpful to you, you wouldn’t have to tell so many lies in the first place.”

Have a great week and as Harry Truman said, “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen!”

For many years The Clarion newspaper took the third week of July off from publication. If I were still publishing the paper, this would be the column in which I explained to my readers that we would be gone for a week. Ah, the good old days . . .

Since I sold the newspaper in March, however, I can’t take the coming week off anymore. It turns out that blogging is a much more intense pursuit than publishing. Instead of the leisurely pace of putting out a paper once a week (with a nice summer vacation), I am now putting up stories 24/7/365, as they happen.

Blogging is exciting, but it is also exhausting, especially when you are responsible for four blogs. In addition to this weekly column, I have to make sure that Bill Lofquist makes his weekly deadline, keep the Clarion News Blog fresh, and in a moment of lunacy, I committed to write a daily campaign blog.

This latter has been the real killer. Some days you just don’t have the time or the energy to write, so my definition of daily has shrunk to about 5 days a week on average. Even so, I am now doing more writing than I did when I was in the newspaper business!

I suspect, like me, a lot of people are still recovering from the Geneseo Summer Festival this past weekend. It was a great weekend but it is also exhausting, even if you’re not doing much more than walking around.

Concrete is a very unforgiving substance. After walking up and down the sidewalks campaigning for most of the day Saturday, I was barely able to walk on Sunday. I particularly felt pain in my hips, which lingered into my Tuesday morning tennis match, even after I skipped the Monday basketball game.

Maybe my daughters were right! When I started building my clay tennis court last year they said it was a big waste of money. “You’ll probably break your hips in a few years anyway,” they told me.

With a little over two weeks to go before the Republican caucus I need to be out pounding on doors. I just need to avoid pounding the pavement. Please forgive me if I walk on your lawn!