One of the most interesting and talented public officials I covered during my years at The Star was William L. Kimsey, who was Jackson County revenue director for several years in the mid-1970s.
Kimsey was a young, up-and-coming accountant, and I was a young and up-and-coming (well, young, anyway) reporter, assigned to the courthouse from 1971 to 1978.
Kimsey had a lot more ambition and brains than I did. He went on to become chief operating officer at the world-wide accounting firm, Ernst & Young. Meanwhile, I went on to ascend, after 26 years of reporting, to the dizzying position of assignment editor and KCK bureau chief.
Anyway, Kimsey, who well understood the warp and woof of politics and its requisite demands of people whose jobs depended on impressing the voters, had a stock saying whenever bad news broke at the courthouse.
With a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his lips, he would declare, “I’m shocked and appalled.”
You couldnt’ go wrong, he knew, with “shocked and appalled.” It captured the appropriate reaction when things were falling apart.
With that long lead-in, readers, I’ve got to tell you that I’m absolutely, devastatingly shocked and appalled at two things:
:: The way The Star is (not) handling the spiral of the Kansas City Royals and the imploding presidency of Barack Obama.
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First, the Royals. They’ve lost five of their last six games and are a game below .500 and four games out of first-place. Only two players in the lineup are significant threats to opposing pitchers — Alex Gordon and Billy Butler.
It looks like the same old story for the Royals: Sliding backward into Memorial Day and headed for oblivion by July 4. And yet, at The Star, only Royals’ beat writer Bob Dutton seems to realize how dire the situation is.
In his Tuesday morning report on Monday’s game, Dutton wrote: “The Royals, right now, are flat-lining after Monday’s depressing 6-5 loss to the Houston Astros at Minute Maid Park. This makes four straight one-run losses; 10 losses overall in the last 14 games…”
But the beat writer can’t swing the cudgel by himself…He needs the heavy lifters — the columnists — to bring proper urgency and impact to bear.
That’s where The Star’s only current sports columnist comes in. Except that Sam Mellinger, who early on showed signs of carrying a sharp knife, is looking like a very dull blade.
Today’s column, for instance, was a treatise explaining how Kauffman Stadium actually is a hitter’s park instead of a pitcher’s park. His column before that, on Monday, was a feature about a T-Bones bullpen catcher who survived cancer. Nice piece, but it came the day after the Oakland A’s completed a three-game sweep of the Royals.
Couldn’t the T-Bones feature have held a few days? And shouldn’t Mellinger have had his eye on the balls that Royals hitters were swinging at but not hitting?
Maybe sports editor Jeff Rosen has told Mellinger he wants him to be more feature oriented and that the much-heralded, new-columnist hire from St. Louis — Vahe Gregorian — will take up the role of “hard hitter” after he goes to work (can’t be soon enough). If that’s the case, a big audience of frustrated Royals’ fans awaits, and Vaghe, with his vast sportswriting experience at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, could easily leapfrog Mellinger.
If Gregorian comes in timid, however, the Royals could well go slipping down that old familiar tube with little more than a protesting whimper from 18th and Grand.
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I doubt that this has ever happened before: liberal columnist Maureen Dowd and conservative columnist George Will writing about the same subject and taking the same line of attack, on the same day.
That’s the case, though, on the Op-Ed page of today’s Star.
The headline on Will’s column is “Obama’s Incredibly Shrinking Presidency.”
The headline on Dowd’s is “From One-Time Messiah to Sad Sack.”
Will
Will wrote about Obama’s “trifecta” of scandals — Benghazi, the IRS and the seizure of Associated Press phone records. Another situation threatening to join the scandal ranks, he suggested, is “Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius soliciting, from corporations in industries HHS regulates, funds…to educate Americans about…Obamacare.”
(It takes a lot of ellipses to quote Will because he writes kind of like a buzzard — circling, circling, before arriving at his destination.)
As usual, though, Will compromises his credibility by baring one of his wacky ideas. Today, it’s the mirage, in his opinion, of global warming. Will contends that global-warming believers have no way of accounting for an “inexplicable 16-year pause” in its effects. What a scientist, that guy…
Dowd takes a different tack. She says that as a candidate, Obama “was romanticized as the pristine relief from Clinton scandals.” But as president, she adds, Obama’s “pure personal life did not exempt him from running a government awash in old-school screw-ups.”
Dowd
She contrasts Obama’s dilemma with past scandals that enveloped Bill and Hillary Clinton.
“The Clintons have emerged stronger on the back end of their scandals,” Dowd wrote. “…Americans have already priced in the imperfections of the Clintons.”
“Who knows?” she said. “If Washington keeps imploding, Hillary may run in 2016 on restoring honor to the White House.”
A wicked line, wouldn’t you agree, from the woman whom President George Bush II dubbed “The Cobra”?
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
Ironically King Hussein’s latest scandals may have provided just the pressure relief valve he desperately needed to keep the level of animosity directed at him from the American people at safe levels.
While a sizable percentage of the public has long recognized the dictatorial tendencies of HRH King Hussein, they received very little support from traditional counterbalances to uber authoritarian politicians like he and Richard Nixon. The media has been little short of fawning and unwilling to criticize even his biggest failures and, absent publicity from the media there has been little appetite for confronting his excesses in either the courts or the halls of Congress. Add to that, the fact that even his supporters lack legitimacy and are perceived as parasites in the eyes of a substantial portion of the population and you have an explosive situation.
And so, folks have been faced with the very real possibility of having to confront his racist Department of Justice and Janet Incompetano’s Brownshirts at DHS themselves. I would argue that much of the motivation to buy up arms and ammunition by normally law-abiding citizens is owing to the fear of this regime and the failure of other societal institutions, notably the media, to confront his excesses. (Not to mention the numerous nullification bills pending in legislatures across the country.
By finally waking up the media and the Congress Hussein may have unwittingly relieved much of the intensity of hatred with which this tinhorn punk is held by many.
That said, this all could backfire as did the optimism prior to the election that he would be defeated. As Davies theory of revolutions predicts, the greatest probability for civil unrest is not during the bad times, but during those times when there is a wide gap between reality and rising expectations.
All of that said, I’m thinking this is a topic better discussed at our favorite $3 burrito joint, perhaps with Mr. Karash in tow.
Can you believe it, readers? The arch conservative Altevogt dining at a cheap (but good) KCK Mexican restaurant with two raging left wingers from the Fifth Estate? Stranger things have happened…
Fifth Estate? What the hell am I thinking. Minus one. Fourth Estate.
Right the first time–the 5th Estate is the Blogosphere, thats you now, sir.
“Nimmo and Combs assert that political pundits constitute a Fifth Estate.[2] Media researcher Stephen D. Cooper argues that bloggers are the Fifth Estate.[3] William Dutton has argued that the Fifth Estate is not simply the blogging community, nor an extension of the media, but ‘networked individuals’ enabled by the Internet in ways that can hold the other estates accountable.[4]
I priced in the Clintons’ scandals. They were just ordinary scumbag, white trash grifters who have both turned into political sociopaths. As a father of a daughter yourself Fitz, I beg of you to contemplate your emotions had said daughter been seduced by presidential power and gone all backstage groupie with the Hail to the Chief’s staff. How absolutely DISGUSTING that any man would do that with an “intern.” Factor in the opportunistic, aggrieved spouse looking to make submarines out of semen, and that’s all you need to know about the Clintons.
The Obamas’ smell is more pungent than the Clintons’ multiplied by John Edwards to the eighth power. I called that spade a spade when he was rising to power out of the Illinois legislature running for US Senate. Ironically, it was Obama über supporter Bill Maher who pointed out the fact that Americans are stupid. Fox News is changing their tag line from “Fair and Balanced” to “We Told You So.”
Sam Mellinger has gone sotto voce since his debut. I thought he would be the perfect combinations of the best of Whitlock and Posnanski. Gelding, headed for the glue factory is more like it.
Until the media in this town start treating their jobs like they are members of The Inquisition and not on a match.com first date, we will continue to suck like 220 volt Dysons in school, politics, sports and every other metric important to quality of life.
You don’t have to beg me on that count, Smartman…The scenario you paint would be worse than having a daughter live in the Playboy Mansion with that Pepsi-guzzling, smoking-jacket-attired creep Hugh Hefner.
I think Hillary seriously damaged her chances of becoming President with the Benghazi whitewash. As usual, the CIA was behind the cover-up, but she could have put her foot down and demanded that the truth be told. Very disappointing.
Like Garrett (Jack Nicholson) said when Aurora (Shirley MacLaine) belatedly forced his hand, about whether he loved her, in “Terms of Endearment”…“I was inches away from a clean getaway.”
The difference is Jack is funny; Hillary is not.
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For the record, here’s that wonderful exchange…
Aurora: Do you have any reaction at all to my telling you I love you?
Garrett: I was just inches from a clean getaway.
Arch conservative? If ever there was a man of the people I am he.
The defection of the Main Stream Media in the face of these many scandals shakes the underpinnings of Obama’s American “Mandate of Heaven”. A “Post Racial President” who appoints Eric Holder to head the Justice Department and declares in the wake of a controversial criminal complaint with a salient manufactured racial component, that if he had a son, he would look like the deceased, is absolutely corrupted by the absolute power accorded him by his former 4th estate supporters.
Shakespearean falls are now in order.
These scandals are coming “Fast and Furious” like flechette mines with short and long term damage as the only constant. Every day, we wake up and read anew of some malfeasance inflicted on an enemies list that assures us indeed, that everything old, is new again.
Presidential hubris and condescension have come before this most assured fall. The White House Press Room is now a scene of chaos, straw men and red herrings, covered in second party blame, hidden behind a mask of confusion. Events are outstripping Obama’s ability to stay in front of the myriad scandals. Extrapolating these events, we can see, at some point, everyone “Lawyering Up”. Then, we get to look inside the oven and see whats for dinner.
I’ll take mine rare.
Chuck — Hey, hey, hey! I didn’t realize I was part of a “new” estate. Thanks for the good catch and the citations…You’re helping an old Fourth Estater make the transition to the Fifth.
Does that make we humble commenters the Sixth Estate? Remember to give thanks and prayers this weekend to those who served that have provided us the opportunity to continue our experiment in governance and the attendant corruption that requires plausible deniability whilst munching on the roots of the Tree of Liberty.
I think it was a Freudian slip. it was a confession that liberal journalists are essentially fifth columnists. Fitz is really part of an international conspiracy of Communist Jewish bankers (Julius Karash is actually his handler and a wealthy banker disguised as a struggling writer) designed to aid and abet King Hussein in his attempts to transform America into a Communist/Muslim Caliphat. (I know parts of this don’t add up, but don’t stop me now, I’m on a roll.) OK, back to earth.
I think one of the most damaging aspects of King Hussein’s regime is the damage it has done to race relations. This is exacerbated everytime someone plays the race card as an excuse for his incompetence and venality.
He and Holder aren’t evil because they’re black (in Hussein’s case, sort of black), they’re evil because they’re totalitarians. I would happily replace Hussein and Holder (and Incompetano) with Hermain Cain, Alan Keyes, and Allen West and be happier than a pig in poop.
Julius certainly could have been a wealthy banker, but he chose, instead, to be a man of the people — just like you, John.
Indeed. Something the 3 of us share in common.
Just hit me, Thomas Frank referred to me as the Jean-Paul Marat of Kansas politics. I don’t know if he meant it as a compliment, but I took it as one.
Stick to showering; no soaking baths.