Who could imagine that the terrible, horrid, catastrophic, monstrously inept times of Tribune would now be looked back on as “the good old days.”

Tribune destroyed one of the great newspaper empires in history — and, astonishingly, they actually look good in comparison to the scorched earthers who are pouring salt on the land and poisoning the wells of the journalstic skeletons wandering the blasted landscape.

The pathetic dolts of Tribune took the wondrous array of Times-Mirror newspapers and ground them down, gutted them, dismantled and dismasted them in one failed program after another; their successor pirates under the mad oaf Sam Zell are hellbent of not merely doubling down on Tribune disasters but making sure that no newspaper worthy of the name shall survive their reign of error.

Having picked Tribune’s pocket, Zell and his shipmates, with a keen eye to assets — not including journalism — of ballparks and downtown real estate, are instituting a slash and burn process from which no quality can possibly survive. This in some of major population centers across the nation, worthy of something more than gimmicks and sleights of hand. Giving the customers less for their money and imagining that they will be happy while massacring the workforce to ensure that no costly excellence shall be respected, they have turned over to the sadsacks in the respective papers who presided over the mess in the first place the assignment to repair it in the second place.

If these blunderers knew what is needed, mightn’t they be expected to have delivered it before now? What are they paid those vast salaries for? With huge layoffs threatened, who has the job to determine whose careers must be shattered? The same saps who ruined the process. Does anyone think that a boss will anywhere be inconvenienced by the gigantic staff reductions and journalism collapse promised by Zell? Of course not.

The wrong people are in charge and the good people — honest employees and the invisible readers — suffer.

Read all about it.