The Kansas City Scar

Like the Chiefs and Royals, the Kansas City Scar has only one direction it can go from here. They're firing people left and right because the same type of idiot who brought us the subprime mortgage meltdown leveraged themselves to the hilt with unrealistic profit expectations. The Scar, like many other dailies, is slashing whatever talent that made them at all worthy.

Lee Judge, for crying out loud. The guy's a left winger to be sure, and I don't agree with him much, but he's a really good editorial cartoonist. I've long hoped I could ever do something that pissed him off badly enough he'd do a cartoon with me in it. My friend Rich Nadler had that honor and savored it. And I've always been jealous of it, and now it appears that even if I buy a steel mill and bust the union that I'll never, ever see a Judge cartoon showing how evil I am.

And while that's a shame, the front page of the paper today is far worse. Just last night, I was referring to the Obama team as the Butt Trust, a term I borrowed from Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn, one of the great contemporary novels).



Thing is, I thought Brain Trust originally referred to FDR's evil and inept cronies. The people who took a severe recession and created a Great Depression, meanwhile creating a template for government to grow out of control no matter what party is in charge. Those fuckers are a lot of the reason we're in the mess we're in right now.

But, getting my Wiki on, I find that it was originally coined in 1901, and was meant sarcastically to refer to the General Command Staff of FDR's cousin, Teddy Roosevelt.

It was an insult.

I guess it was, if you wanted to know the truth, in FDR's day, though I doubt the people using the term then were any more aware of the irony than the (most likely entry-level and inexpensive) idiots who came up with the Scar's headline today.