Mike Hendricks is the reason The Kansas City Star Deserves to Fail!!!

There's another round of layoffs coming at The Kansas City Star, the people who are already out on the street are desperately scrambling to find another way to make an income according to a great deal of local gossip.

Out of work former Star staffers should blame the failure of their newspaper on KC Star Columnist Mike Hendricks.

Not since George W. Bush has a person so completely embodied nearly every principle of the white privilege, arrogance and incompetence that threatens to lead this country into ruin at the outset of this global economic collapse.

And yet again . . .

MIKE HENDRICKS HAS BEEN CAUGHT STEALING HIS COLUMN IDEAS FROM TKC!!!

Today's missive by Mike Hendricks - a dude who also embodies the term "garbage wrapped in skin" - tells of trouble for a camera crew capturing images of the Liberty memorial.

Here's the problem . . .

TKC RAN THAT SAME STORY ALMOST TWO WEEKS AGO AND GARNERED A MUCH BETTER REACTION THAN THE JOCO THIEF MIKE HENDRICKS!!!

It's almost sad . . . Even a blogger read only by friends and family has the common courtesy, nay decency to offer a link back . . . Sadly, the thin-lipped, pink with envy thieving instincts that drive Hendricks lead him to rely on cultural appropriation as a first resort.

Mike Hendricks is the Pat Boone of the written word in Kansas City.

I'm not trying to contend that I'd like to see his family thrown out on the street, their home foreclosed as they all wait on the sidewalk embarrassed and humiliated as their JoCo neighbors look on but then turn their heads and close their widow shades to avoid the disgrace of the columnist who once earned close to 100k Big Star Bucks but is now working for a pittance and half benefits . . . I'm just noting that I wouldn't feel too horrible if all that stuff happened.

I'm sure the feeling is mutual.

Still . . . The problem is that Hendricks pretending to write without the help of the Kansas City blogosphere only shows the ignorance and ineptitude of The Star as a whole. The organization is dying and instead of cooperating with the local Internets and working to raise awareness of their product . . . They're simply hoping to survive by ignoring the transition in the media and behaving in exactly the same parasitic manner that they use to stereotype bloggers.

I didn't create the video that's at the center of this story and that Hendricks didn't even link . . . I was simply one of first in the area to share it and write about it at length . . . But I talk to enough people in the Kansas City Star newsroom to realize that so many of them are completely unprepared and unwilling to deal with a more democratic media landscape . . . In much the same way Hendricks went out to desperately recruit Latino friends after I started to eat his lunch on a regular basis.

Anyhoo . . . The point is . . . Mike Hendricks and his backward, petty, white privilege style is a big part of the reason that The Star means less and less to the people of Kansas City every day. He is single-handedly turning the paper of record into a dusty historical periodical rather than a force for change and discussion. And the worst part of all of it is that his panicked approach to dealing with and stealing from Kansas City blogs (like TKC) fails to realize that it's The Star's poor decision making and not any external forces are ultimately to blame for their impending demise.

I can only hope that this middle-aged white man who stays losing in his quickly vanishing industry is not a metaphor for the much more important fate of the United States of America.