1115.org

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Here’s how credulous you have to be in order to be a national media personality.

Mike Barnicle, filling in for Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball on Monday, claimed that the Britney-and-Paris anti-Obama ad which has come in for so much criticism, “offended (McCain’s) sense of honor“. In his view, the McCain campaign has been spending over $140,000 a day (roughly a third of his overall TV spending) to run the ad only because McCain hasn’t paid attention to the ad. It just hasn’t crossed his radar, apparently.

Barnicle’s exact statement:

(The Britney-and-Paris ad) also, I would think, gets to his, something that he’s very proud of, has been very proud of and it’s been clear in talking to him over the years, his sense of honor. I think an ad like that offended, or would offend if he paid attention to it, his sense of honor.

In case you’re wondering why the name Mike Barnicle sounds familiar, he used to be a columnist for The Boston Globe. That was before he resigned in disgrace ten years ago amid allegations of plagiarism and fabrication:

Just a week after fending off demands that he resign amid charges of plagiarism, Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle quit Wednesday as questions were being raised about two more of his columns.

The pugnacious writer, who has become an institution in Boston over the course of a 25-year career at the Globe, told TV station WCVB that his resignation was “the best thing for the paper.”

Globe editor Matthew Storin told the staff that he had asked for and received Barnicle’s resignation, because of questions about whether the writer had fabricated characters in a 1995 column.

Also, in an issue that will hit newsstands Friday, The Boston Phoenix weekly newspaper will report that Barnicle lifted portions of a 1986 column from a 1961 book by journalist A.J. Liebling.

Earlier this month, Storin demanded Barnicle’s resignation after discovering that he used jokes from a book by George Carlin without attribution in an August 2 column. But after an outcry from the public and some other journalists, Storin relented and announced last week that Barnicle would be suspended for two months without pay instead.

And now here he is, after all these years, fabricating a pathetic defense of McCain.

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For the record, this whole notion that McCain is still a good guy, it’s just that his campaign has been hijacked by bad guys, and there’s nothing poor McCain can do about it, is ridiculous beyond belief.

McCain, of all people, knows fully well the slash-and-burn tactics that are the stock-in-trade of Rove and his acolytes. In 2000, it was the vicious smear that Rove cooked up about McCain fathering an illegitimate black child that derailed his presidential campaign after his surprising victory over George Bush in New Hampshire.

I wish Barnicle could be forced to explain what he thinks McCain expected when he put Rove disciple Steve Schmidt in charge of his campaign.

(The last link, ironically, takes you to Rick Davis’s 2004 account of the smear. Davis, of course, used to run McCain’s campaign before McCain turned it over to Schmidt.)

For my money, McCain is getting exactly what he bargained for. Though even McCain probably didn’t anticipate how many in the media would continue to worship at his shrine even after he wholeheartedly embraced Rove’s contemptible and dishonest tactics.