Chi Trib is a crafty creature. Items are searchable outside its archives for one week and no more, which may not be unusual. But there's no advice to look in archives if you can't find what you're looking for, boo-hoo. So I missed the John Kass column of one week ago 4/15, "America needs Bush to lead, not Oprah," , which archives has for you at $2.95. UNLESS you get at it via the Kass page under "recent columns." So yes, Chi Trib did have comment on Madame Gorelick and Chi readers were not as deprived as I said.

Eric Zorn in today's Chi Trib -- on the trial of racist-and-proud-of-it Matthe Hale -- is as measured and readable statement of constitutional rectitude as we are likely to find in a daily noosepaper.

And in Chi Sun-Times Monday 4/19, irregular columnist and onetime TV reporter Mary Laney blows whistle on Clinton aide Jamie Gorelick as member of 9/11 commission. [Not linkable] Fox in chicken coop is this Gorelick, who herself tied investigative hands in 1996 with a memo, adopted as Unholy Writ by AG Janet Reno, that prevented FBI from searching computer of suspected Al Quaeda terrorist Z. Moussaoui. Gorelick gives new meaning to chutzpah by (a) serving on the commission when she should be one of those testifying and (b) grilling C. Rice et al.

No one at Chi Trib commented on this, though its web site has a thorough airing of the matter in an AP story. The reliable Robert Novak reported on it in three lead paragraphs to his 4/18 news-item column in S-T. Otherwise, Chicago readers have been out in the cold in this more than ordinarily crucial matter.

BOOK TIME! . . . The books they are a comin' out. Now comes Woodward with fixation story. Cheney "fixated" on Iraq, says S-T head 4/17. Look for more of that in the next few days, until it peaks. It's more proof that Clever Sigmund, that investigator of upper-class Jewish women's minds (whatever did they want?) in pre-WW1 Vienna, did one big thing if nothing else: He gave a new, sophisticated passive-aggressive ways to say "Your father's mustache" or "Up yours" or "asshole." Thanks to him, we can easily avoid something like "firm intent" to do this or that (vs. fixation on same) or "longstanding conviction" and instead chalk it up to something really crazy.

COMPARED TO WHAT PRESIDENT? . . . An interesting question is, were Bushies more fixated on Iraq (and is it news that Wolfowitz et al. were for radical solution of the world's Middle East problem?) than FDR was on Nazi Germany and the Axis (of evil) of his day? To the exclusion of worrying about Stalinist Russkies, for instance? Get lost, FD heatedly told normally trusted advisor-with-access Adolf Berle when B. came to him with W. Chambers's damning and credible accusations of Alger Hiss as Commie agent -- which he was, we know now, thanks to Venona papers, not to mention what came out of two trials as excellently anatomized by Allen Weinstein in Perjury: the Hiss-Chambers Case (Knopf, 1978). There he went again, FDR and his fixations.

Bottom line regarding new books a'comin': This be partisan politics, folks. Libs at it again, big time. Fixated.

LET THE PRESSES ROLL . . . As for mainstream newsies, hey, the latest Woodward book is a peg wherewith to keep ball rolling, from here not to eternity but to the 1st Tuesday in November.

GW deceived us, they say. FDR didn't? New book coming out comparing the two as to deception quotient? Not that we know of, though Right Wing Conspiracy Publishers might find it a good idea.

As for deception, what about supposed newsie Woodward sitting on all those good quotes while helping to put out a daily newspaper, his Wash Post? I'm trying to imagine how daily paper editors I knew would have liked that.

STUMBLING THROUGH . . . Chi Trib headlines "a leader stumbles," page one, 4/14. Of ACLU, which pre-9/11 would have said fingering of suspects was profiling and would have hauled law enforcers into court for violation of civil liberties and even now objects to Patriot Act, our best shot so far at nailing pre-crime perps? No, the U.S. -- dare I say "our"? -- president, who if he had only bombed an aspirin factory and let it go at that, would be an A-OK moderate Republican handwringer not to be analyzed by Michael Tackett on page one just left of the headline story.

Tackett's back with page one analyses. Analyze this, says m.e. James O'Shea or some other editor, and away he goes. Plus ca change here. Chi Trib of Col. McCosmic days did it on page one with a Carey Orr or Parrish cartoon showing FDR with cigarette holder and raised chin or wide-eyed bomb throwers with scraggly beard and hair askew. Now the same effect is achieved in this more sophisticated age by a Tackett analysis. "Analyze this," say editors, and he does it.

WHO, ME? . . . Plus Ashcroft vs. accusatory FBI man. Is FBI at least as much in a CYA mode as anyone else in these days of finger-pointing? What's this commission up to, by the way? It's circus time in Washington. Ashcroft makes "pointed [counter]attacks," Cam Simpson writes, apparently upset at A's saying he did not want to add to our pain. B.S., mutters Simpson, whose 4th paragraph offers an interesting succession of blamers-of-others. It would have made a good lead paragraph if one were not playing to the get-Ashcroft gallery.

Accusatory FBI man says he did not know why nobody else in the FBI took him seriously either? Oh? But accusation of Ashcroft is lede, whether put there by Cam or moved up by an O'Shea minion?

Ashcroft found or says he found -- who in the gallery can believe him? -- no Clinton effort to off Bin Laden. That's been said for months in the right-wing press, which adds that on one occasion that Bill was finishing up a golf game. But no mainstreamer has willing to muck up its skirts in such an investigation. Yuck! The people who raise those issues do not turn up at the parties. And nobody Pauline Kael knew voted for Nixon in '68.