Mike Barnicle, a frequent liberal guest on MSNBC's Morning Joe weekday program, hammered Republicans on Sunday in a posting at the Daily Beast website entitled “Why Is the GOP So Angry at Everything These Days?” His answer: Republicans “are furious at the world. Their solution: Declare war on it.”
Barnicle's article started out innocently enough, with the writer noting that during the past week, “many paused to reflect during Passover and Easter ceremonies.”
It went all downhill from there.
During those seven days, “a question with no real answer seemed to crash into our culture with all the subtlety of a marching band in a funeral parlor: Why do so many Republicans seem so angry all the time at so much around us?”
Barnicle then listed several Republicans who are gearing up for the 2016 presidential election. His first target was Texas Senator Ted Cruz, whose “fury” is “understandable. It’s fueled by his massive ego and outsized ambition.”
And that's not all, the writer noted. Cruz has a “personal belief that he is so smart and the rest of us are so pedestrian that he can manipulate opinion to win the Republican nomination for president with the support of the mentally ill wing of his party.”
“Then there is the minor league Cruz,” Barnicle stated, “the tough-talking, totally in-over-his-head governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, who is running to crack down on the salaries of teachers, cops and firefighters everywhere.”
“There are so many others,” he stated:
There’s the kid who started the pen pal club with the ayatollah, Tom Cotton.
There’s the mental midget from Illinois, Mark Kirk, who went right to the basement for his best thought on Iran, claiming that England got a better deal from Hitler than the U.S. got from Tehran.
Barnicle finally turned his attention to his real target: “the former ambassador to the United Nations, John 'Bombs Away' Bolton,” who “took to the Op-Ed page of the New York Times to declare war on Iran.”
“'The inconvenient truth is that only military action,' Field Marshall Bolton wrote, 'can accomplish what is required. Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed.'”
“Bolton, of course, is one of the Mensa members who told George W. Bush that it would be swell to go to war in Iraq,” Barnicle stated. “Twelve years later, things are really going well there.”
“Obviously, Bolton never made it to Vietnam,” the writer stated. “He joined the Maryland National Guard to avoid going to Vietnam and hey, good for him. At least he served.”
However, “I guess that explains the itch, the unfulfilled need, the frustration that guys like Bolton have lived with across the decades,” Barnicle claimed before noting that “according to some pundits, he's even considering a run for president.”
“Obviously, his platform will remain as unchanged as his thinking: different time, different dangers, different countries but same selfish solution: Send someone else’s kids to fight and die while Bolton and others play with a lit fuse in a world more dangerous than dynamite,” he concluded.
It didn't take long for William Bigelow at Breitbart.com to address many of the falsehoods and errors in Barnicle's column.
“Barnicle, who quit the Boston Globe in 1998 after the editor called for his resignation amid rumors he fabricated one story and plagiarized another, decided to exhibit more of his unrepressed rage at conservatives ... in an article hilariously titled 'Why is the GOP So Angry at Everything These Days?'”
Bigelow pointed to Ted Cruz as “a Harvard law grad” and criticized Barnicle for referring to “the mentally ill wing of his party.”
“Hard-line conservatives mentally ill?” Bigelow asked. “That sounds a teensy bit angry.”
Barnicle then slammed Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who won three elections in four years despite being a conversative official in a liberal state.
“Barnicle’s rage continues,” Bigelow stated, “as he calls Senator Tom Cotton, another Harvard Law grad and war hero, 'the kid who started the pen pal club with the ayatollah.'”
“The rest of Barnicle’s venom pours out in a lengthy attack on estimable former ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, … ripping him as 'one of the Mensa members who told George W. Bush that it would be swell to go to war in Iraq.'”
“Twelve years later, things are really going well there,” Barnicle joked. Bigelow responded: ”True, thanks to a certain someone who pulled the troops out, losing the war we had won.”
Of course, Barnicle couldn't miss an opportunity to slam the state government in Indiana, where they spent the past week fighting “to make it harder for some Americans simply to be happy.”
“Make no mistake about it, their war was against same-sex marriage,” he added, carefully avoiding the fact that 18 other states have similar legislation.
