Barnicle'd 3-31-03

Ah the things we do to hold out to that nice spread in Lincoln Mass eh Mikey?
Yup you guessed it, my utmost ultimate favorite was on Imus today, the disgraced former columnist for the Boston Globe Mike Barnicle.
Ghod I love this guy, he is my very meat.
This blog couldn't exist without him.
Mike is now a New York Daily News columnist (where I'm sure the absence of a fact-checker was a contractual prerequisite) and a radio talk show tyrant here in Boston.
He has wandered out onto that lonely windswept place where the contrarians abide and endorsed wholeheartedly Mr. Bush's war-much to Don Imus' delight.
True to form Mike was out to score as many cheap pseudo-populist shots as he could from this conflict...his voice was up a full octave over normal as he surrendered to hysterics with gusto.
Frankly Barnicle was hyperventilating all through out his phone-in like a stoolie down to his last tip. You'd a thought he was nervous about something....
Anxious or not, Barnicle came out swinging, he noted with all due bluster and on the basis of no evidence that there were class differences between the war protesters and the U.S. soldiers...and that somehow is a bad thing.
Ever noticed how endlessly hung up on class conflict Mike Barnicle is?
A shot does not ring out anywhere in this world that Mike can't break down the whole conflict in terms of the effete haves versus the virtuous have-nots...and if the have-nots are poor put upon white urbanites much oppressed by poverty pimps and naive state legislators from the burbs' so much the better.
Mike is a kind of poet laureate for what I like to call "Caucasiastan" an entirely mythical urban white enclave in which upstanding sleeveless undershirted white father's beat frowzy white wives who in turn are saintly tyrants over their adorable children. And above them all the Monsignor broods over his simpleminded flock 24-7 even as they play stickball in the streets after catechism.
It doesn't exist of course, except maybe in the old "Dead End Kids" movies but nevertheless it does form the basis of Mike's omnipresent class consciousness.
Which is the predictable spin Mike has on this war...blue collar whites love President Bush, Bush in turn wants this war, therefore Mike Barnicle is for this war out of a sad delusional fear that any other stance might separate him from his beloved Caucasiastani readership.
My thing with Mike is for all his ranting and raving I do think he has either a mind or a heart...I can't quite figure which though. Because the agitated, sweaty and huffy way he barrels through these call-ins with Imus indicates that Barnicle doesn't quite believe his own line of bullshit.
At one point Mike blurted out that he just wanted Saddam dead and he didn't care whether democracy took root in Iraq or another General seized power...he just wanted it over.
Which is a sure sign Mike is panicking, because the news isn't good of late, his hero George Bush may have just stumbled into the U.S.A. own intifadah complete with fanatical suicide bombers.
Barnicle is braying hard that we are there "for the best of purposes" yet he's a peace with notion that we can quit once Saddam is dead and another tyrant substituted in his place.
If Mike was a conservative true believer he'd NEVER abandon the Admin's nonsensical line about exporting democracy with it's PACs and recounts to Iraq....the Severins and Limbaughs of this world are settled on that point.
No, Barnicle has just enough wherewithal left to realize that this war might end badly.
He has already naively asserted that Secretary Rumsfeld should come-clean and admit he let his expectations "got too high"...a hypothetical statement subdued in it's truthfulness but still no comfort to the soldiers in the field.
Poor Mike, he has no safe harbor in this war; he knows we've been lied to all along, he can't line up with the anti-war faction for class based reasons...and so he flails and grunts his way through these Imus appearances sounding more and more like a stroke victim whose meds are inexplicably late.
Ultimately his whole Ambassador-from-Caucasiastan act has got Mike so beaten down that he can't even begin to articulate his own suspicions and worries.
Well...that is what happens to reporters and editorialists who make place sentiment and partisanship above the truth....you end up yapping incoherently like Mike Barnicle.
Frankly when a "journalist" even one as bad as Mike Barnicle can't even tell himself the truth anymore it's time to bail on the newsman's trade and see if the local Dairy Queen is hiring.
Sick
Demented
Typical...