Wednesday morning odds and ends

A few items for your consideration:

  • Why didn’t the Illinois legislature use the last few weeks to pass an emergency bill taking away Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s power to fill the Senate vacancy, and then do it again over his veto? Given that failure, I can’t imagine how anyone can stop Blago’s choice, Roland Burris, from being seated.
  • Lobbyist Vicki Iseman’s libel suit against the New York Times may be a classic case of a story that’s accurate but not true. No doubt the Times was accurate in reporting that anonymous former aides to John McCain had worried eight years ago that he might be having an affair with Iseman. But when you put it that way, you can understand why she’s suing.
  • Adam Reilly does a nice job of deconstructing Boston Magazine editor James Burnett’s weirdly obsequious interview with Mike Barnicle. But I’d love to hear from Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, a longtime Barnicle nemesis with whom Barnicle now claims to have kissed and made up. That would be pretty damn interesting.
  • D’oh! When I recently wrote that I like Globe columnist Bob Ryan on New England Sports Network, I didn’t realize his show, “Globe 10.0,” had been canceled. You certainly wouldn’t know it from the NESN Web site. Truth be told, I only watched it during baseball season. But it was good! Really!

Man bites dog

The Phoenix’s David Bernstein salutes Mike Barnicle for writing a tough Huffington Post piece on John McCain, whom he had praised fulsomely for many years.

I’ll go halfway there. Barnicle is mighty critical of McCain, and it’s wondrous to see. But he can’t quite seem to get it through his head that it was McCain himself who hired the advisers “who took his honor and reputation and tossed it out like so many discarded items for a yard sale.” As I said the other day, there is no such thing as candidates who are better than their campaigns.

Here’s what I’d really like to know. What would David Nyhan think? I can’t recall a liberal pundit more enamored of McCain than Nyhan was. Unfortunately, he’s not here to tell us.

Recycling at a place called HuffPost

An appalled Boston Globe staffer alerted me yesterday to Mike Barnicle’s debut on the Huffington Post. “Who’s next, Jayson Blair?” my correspondent asked.

I read it, and the familiar hackery took me back many years, when we all read a columnist called Barnicle in a paper called the Globe in a city called Boston in a country called America. Barnicle’s conceit is an old one for him: Some guy died in a place called Vietnam 40 years ago, and, damn it, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton don’t even know who he was. But Mike Barnicle does.

Not to denigrate the memory of the soldier who died, Francis Xavier Kane. But Barnicle’s been writing this column since at least the 1980s. In Barnicle’s hands, these maudlin exercises invariably involve the use of the phrase “a place called,” an attempt to imbue his sentimental ramblings with a Hemingwayesque touch of manful dignity. For instance, in his HuffPost piece, Barnicle informs us that young Francis Kane met his end “a few miles west of a lethal place called Quang Tri City in a country called Vietnam.”

As I said, Barnicle has written this column many, many times over the years. What follows is a sampling. Believe me, it didn’t take long to put this together.

“He was killed in a firefight exactly two years ago at a place named Tuwayhah in a country called Iraq. He was 25.” (Boston Herald, April 14, 2005)

“All the simple things people take for granted disappeared for Peter Damon in the flash of an explosion early one morning last fall in a place called Camp Anaconda located in Balad, Iraq, north of Baghdad.” (Boston Herald, March 9, 2004)

“Lucas is 67, McCarthy is 83 and both hold the Medal of Honor, awarded for what they did on two different days of February 1945 at a place called Iwo Jima.” (Boston Globe, Oct. 26, 1995)

“He was south of Hue City, Vietnam, with the 9th Marines, in a place called Phu Bai.” (Boston Globe, Sept. 30, 1990)

“… a place called the Gulf of Tonkin during the summer of 1964.” (Boston Globe, Aug. 21, 1990)

“On Sept. 17, 1966 — two days before his 19th birthday — he found himself in a place called Cu Chi, which is about 15 miles west of Saigon, Republic of South Vietnam.” (March 11, 1990)

“His last name was Gonzalez and as he lay dying at 18 near a place called Con Thien in the Republic of South Vietnam nearly a quarter century ago.” (Boston Globe, April 25, 1989)

“… he has only one leg, the other having been blown off just over 20 years ago at a place called My Tho, a very pretty town on the Bassac River in the Mekong Delta …” (Boston Globe, Nov. 12, 1988)

“… almost exactly to this day, my friend Tommy Gill, then with the 3d Marines, nearly lost his life to gunfire at a place called Con Thien where fighting was fierce and constant.” (Boston Globe, Feb. 12, 1988)

“He was killed at a place called The Parrot’s Beak, fighting the communist army from Hanoi.” (Boston Globe, March 30, 1987)

“Wake me up and tell me no mother’s son ever died in a place called Vietnam.” (Boston Globe, Dec. 30, 1985)

“… two decades since other Marines, elements of the Ninth Division, walked ashore about three miles south of a place called DaNang …” (Boston Globe, April 26, 1985)

“His name was Anh Mai and he had come to the United States of America in 1979 from a place called Saigon in a country called Vietnam.” (April 15, 1985)

“The soldiers were fed three times in the nine days before the survivors emerged at a place called Stalag 3B near Frankfurt.” (Dec. 17, 1984)

“It is a letter, a letter written on Memorial Day of that year from a place called Khe Sanh in a country called Vietnam.” (Boston Globe, May 30, 1983)

“All of them came back except for Frankie Viola who caught a bullet on March 3, 1945, at a place called ‘Sulpher Island,’ known in history as Iwo Jima.” (Boston Globe, May 14, 1982)

“… razor blades spilled out of his mouth as he lectured those outside a Senate hearing room about the growing troubles in a place called El Salvador.” (Boston Globe, March 6, 1981)

“God is dead on the cover of Time magazine. Your son is dead in a place called Chu Lai. Who killed him, anyway?” (Boston Globe, Dec. 10, 1980)

“He hated the war. He was of the First Marines, India Company, Third Battalion, fought in a place called Quang Tri province, Vietnam and hated it.” (Boston Globe, Sept. 10, 1980)

Barnicle may be WBUR-bound

The Phoenix’s Adam Reilly has some rather startling news. Apparently Paul La Camera, general manager of WBUR Radio (90.9 FM), is thinking of bringing in former Globe and occasional Herald columnist Mike Barnicle to do commentary.

La Camera has done a great job of bringing stability to ‘BUR and of adding some local focus to a station that has long been admired for its national reach. But he’s just wrong when he tells Reilly that Barnicle was done in by “wild accusations.” Barnicle left the Globe in 1998 after he was caught plagiarizing and making stuff up, but those were only the latest in a quarter-century of similar, very credible complaints.

La Camera and Barnicle have a history: Barnicle is a contributor to “Chronicle,” a magazine show on WCVB-TV (Channel 5), the station La Camera used to run. It was La Camera who decided to keep Barnicle on “Chronicle” after his meltdown at the Globe, a decision that played to mixed reviews internally.

Barnicle already does commentary for WTKK Radio (96.9 FM) and MSNBC. His grumpy-old-man shtick does nothing for me, but if he’s good for ratings, then fine. But ‘BUR and the National Public Radio system are news organizations that take credibility and ethics very seriously. It will be fascinating to see how this plays out.

Is McPhee parting ways with the Herald?

On a day when publisher Pat Purcell is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the birth of the modern Boston Herald comes word that one of the paper’s more recognizable bylines may soon be departing. The Phoenix’s Adam Reilly writes that crime reporter Michele McPhee is rumored to be leaving.

Oddly enough, the McPhee rumors come at exactly the same time that her 10 a.m.-to-noon program on WTKK (96.9 FM) has been displaced by Michael Graham, who was moved out of the morning drive-time slot to make way for the new Imus show. Perhaps McPhee will pop up elsewhere on the station. Stay tuned.

And speaking of Imus, the Herald’s Jessica Heslam reports that I-buddy Mike Barnicle will be doing local commentaries during the show on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Gee, the excitement just never ends, does it?