A good boss at a bad time for the Sun-Times, John Cruickshank restored a lot of the dignity that had been tossed aside by Conrad Black and David Radler. Circulation fraud was owned up to; the editorial page stopped carrying water for the paper’s business interests.
An unfortunate legacy of the Cruickshank era is that this sort of story became the Sun-Times’s idea of page-one news. Yet Jennifer Hunter, who’s married to Cruickshank and has been following Obama around for months, never wrote anything about the naked lapel herself. Either she didn’t notice it or judged it too insignificant to report on.
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“Obama’s latest spouting off makes us question his judgment. . . . His polarizing comments make him sound like a hardened leftist. . . . In one unscripted moment, he undermines his whole campaign. . . . His campaign can suffer no more gaffes.”
The New York Times asked Republican senators what they thought. John Ensign of Nevada: “The type of behavior we are talking about here is not exactly something that I think a senator should be engaged in.” Saxby Chambliss of Georgia: “I can’t think of anything good about it.” Jim DeMint of South Carolina: “You don’t want to know what I really feel.”
Two weeks ago in this space I ripped sportswriters who ripped the Saint Louis Cardinals’ Rick Ankiel for injecting himself with human growth hormone when he was a broken-down minor league ballplayer hoping to salvage his career. HGH is banned by the big leagues now, but it wasn’t in 2004, and Ankiel at the time was trying to recover faster from an elbow injury, not turn himself into Superman.
“I have no doubt Ankiel’s health improved because of human growth hormone,” Passan wrote. “Whether that makes it right is an area that remains gray. But the FDA doesn’t allow it.”
Why was this law written? I kept looking. Here’s a “statutory overview” from 1998 posted by the U.S. Department of Justice on its Web site: “In recognition of the fact that illegal drug trafficking in anabolic steroids and human growth hormone was becoming larger in scope and presenting an ever-increasing health risk to young athletes, Congress addressed the issue with two amendments. . . . The purpose of both of these amendments was to criminalize steroid and human growth hormone trafficking.”
