Our spy in St. Joseph tell us that the flooding Missouri River has put water into the riverboat casino there. As our spy put it, “Water has now reached the lobby area and I estimate it at a few inches deep.”

I thought riverboats were supposed to FLOAT!!!

It seems well past time for us to quit referring to Missouri’s “riverboat casinos.” They’re just casinos, plain and simple. The people who created this industry years and years ago could only do so by creating the pretty fiction that our casinos are in some way or another riverboats. The vision of a stately modern twin-stack sternwheelers or side-wheelers going on a “cruise” on our great rivers was an attractive one for voters who supported legalizing riverboat gambling.

That lasted just long enough for the industry to build something that was too big to turn around during a cruise and probably so underpowered as to be unsafe. So the compromise was truck. The casinos could be built in “moats” in which water from the river would be placed, thus making them “river” boat casinos. .

Now the flood is displaying the fiction of the “boat” half of the name.

They’re casinos. And They have to look something like a riverboat. But let’s recognize the phrase “riverboat casino” is about as accurate as calling the Gateway Arch a square.

Let’s sink the riverboat. (By the way, the St.Joseph newspaper had a picture of the casino in yesterday’s paper)