Ask a Stupid Question . . .
So it’s pretty well established that just one American in three (and change) likes the job the president is doing. That could be why Fox decided to push beyond these tediously consistent results and ask a question that cut to the bone, a question that asked, in other words, are you for the president or against him? Do you hope he’ll turn things around, or do you want him to fall flat on his face?
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When Fox posted the 50-question poll online on August 10 it didn’t call attention to the “succeed” question (it was mentioned in the last paragraph of a two-page news release). But nothing gets past the blogosphere. Conservative sites lit up over the fresh evidence that whatever the latest news might be from Iraq, liberals and Democrats are to be scorned and pitied for their rancid souls. At PoliPundit.com “The Ace” marveled, “Shocking, I know. By shocking I mean only 51%, the hypocrisy is expected as it is a virtue for the American left. Look, they hate, hate, and hate some more. That is all they have along with their ignorance.”
Fox News is unusually impenetrable, so I had no luck connecting with anyone who could tell me what Fox thought the point of its question was. To me it showed that lucidity, like absurdity, is irrepressible.
To my surprise, the Jay the Joke entry clung to its spot in Wikipedia for ten days, though almost from the moment of its August 11 creation it was threatened with deletion on the grounds that its subject was too trivial to deserve notice. Not to my surprise, during its ten-day lifetime the original entry was completely rewritten.
Wildly successful? I e-mailed Bruce Dold, editor of the Tribune’s editorial page, and asked which TIFs he had in mind. His reply pulled in the paper’s horns a little: “Based on property value growth, a number of Chicago TIFs have been very successful. Obviously you can’t attribute all the development to the TIF, but I wouldn’t dismiss them. Some of the suburban downtown TIFs have worked well.”
Last year Smyth was working on a story about Guatemalan drug trafficking and wondered why Congressman Jerry Weller, vice chairman of the House’s western hemisphere subcommittee, wouldn’t talk to him. It turned out that Weller rarely speaks publicly to anybody about Guatemala. His Guatemalan wife, Zury Rios Sosa, sits in the national legislature; her father, Efrain Rios Montt, still powerful, was the country’s president during the bloodiest months of the scorched-earth campaign.
