'Car Dictator' wouldn't sound as cool?

The other day we noted, in a column about our crumbling Republic:

Forget about naming an "Auto Czar." If our elected representatives no longer control the purse strings of our government, then we have a real Czar instead of a president. (By the way, the word czar is a slavic form of Caesar, or Kaiser. Funny how words mean things.)

Lo and behold, Jonah Goldberg over at The Corner in National Review, has a post today about the use of the word "czar," so acceptable with our media elite these days, and how that came about. He has questions and observations of his own.

I do find all the talk about czars fascinating. If you read through newspapers and magazines in the 1920s and 1930s, you'll find that the word "dictator" was used pretty much exactly the way we use czar today (though obviously that wasn't its only usage). "Dictator" had a negative connotation back then, but not solely negative.
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For obvious reasons, "dictator" went out of fashion by the 1940s. The use of czar seems to have filled its place. You can see the appeal as pretty much no one has a living memory of life under the Czars. It has a romantic sound and people don't know its roots in the word Caesar (ditto Kaiser). Americans wouldn't tolerate a "car king" or "car dictator" or even a "car Caesar." But "car czar" sounds both ironic and quaint.

There's more.