Columnist with Conviction
Rentschler, who’d been Richard Nixon’s Illinois campaign chairman in 1968 and campaigned for his party’s nomination for the U.S. Senate two years later, called himself Thompson’s “showcase Republican.” Insisting that business associates ran the timber venture into the ground while he was running for office, and that no one took more of a financial battering than himself, Rentschler declared, “I really think we’ve seen a little bit of Hitler in this part of America. I think Thompson and his handpicked successor [Sam Skinner] and the people they’ve trained are political assassins.”
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Rentschler was given 90 days in a work-release program. Five months later he pleaded guilty in federal court to bank fraud and was sentenced to a year in prison. The life he’s fashioned for himself since his release has been that of a fearless journalist alerting the public to prosecutorial tyranny. In columns and editorials written in the mid-80s for a string of North Shore newspapers he owned, he contended that Thompson had perfected “the technique of political assassination,” that within the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago “there is an arrogance that smacks of the police state,” that there is a “Thompson Cabal . . . whose tentacles of influence have spread octopus-like through the federal prosecutorial apparatus in Chicago, the federal bench, and some of Chicago’s biggest law firms.” To “Thompson and his cronies” Rentschler attributed “Machiavellian cunning.”
Rentschler explained why he’d left his own background out of his column (as he’d left it out of numerous other columns and editorials, including one in the Reader about two prisoners he claimed were victims of prosecutorial zealousness). “I felt my case was relatively inconsequential.” But Kerner was “the biggest hide of all the hides that Jim Thompson went after.”
The Tribune would report: “Gingrich said the protesters had no new ideas, just ‘chants left over from the ’60s.’ Their ire was focused on the Republican Party’s proposed cuts of programs for health care, the elderly, public aid and children.
When “would-be fascists” get some idea in their heads about health care, a good dose of disdain is their just deserts. To make its coverage even more one-sided, the Sun-Times ran a sidebar devoted to Gingrich’s “opinions” that gave him extra space to sneer. “I think Medicare is the only issue with enough emotional power that if the liberal Democrats can get away with lying about it they could have a big impact on the next campaign. I think, however, that the big truth beats the big lie in a free society.”
