THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE HAS ENDORSED PRESIDENT BUSH:

A President Kerry certainly would punish those who want us dead. As he pledged, with cautiously calibrated words, in accepting his party’s nomination: “Any attack will be met with a swift and certain response.” Bush, by contrast, insists on taking the fight to terrorists, depriving them of oxygen by encouraging free and democratic governments in tough neighborhoods. As he stated in his National Security Strategy in 2002: “The United States can no longer solely rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. … We cannot let our enemies strike first.”

Bush’s sense of a president’s duty to defend America is wider in scope than Kerry’s, more ambitious in its tactics, more prone, frankly, to yield both casualties and lasting results. This is the stark difference on which American voters should choose a president.

There is much the current president could have done differently over the last four years. There are lessons he needs to have learned. And there are reasons–apart from the global perils likely to dominate the next presidency–to recommend either of these two good candidates.

But for his resoluteness on the defining challenge of our age–a resoluteness John Kerry has not been able to demonstrate–the Chicago Tribune urges the re-election of George W. Bush as president of the United States.

I must say I’m surprised by this. Be sure to read the whole thing. (Via The Glittering Eye).

UPDATE: Several readers email that the Trib endorsed Bush in 2000, so that I shouldn’t be surprised. They’re right, and I apologize for attributing to the editorial page the slant of the paper’s news operation. I should have recognized that there’s a wall of separation between the two. . . .