Dakota wrote:
You guys might think I am being facetious. I am not. I find it inexplicable for him to be so out of sight at precisely the time he is needed most. And I am not the only one who is saying this. Heard Mike Barnicle this morning saying the same thing. It is at times like this that leaders are needed most.

In 1973, just after he'd begun his thrice-weekly column, Barnicle quoted a Boston gas station owner as making a racial slur at the height of the city's busing crisis. The man sued. In 1982, he was awarded $40,000 after a judge ruled that Barnicle had "interlineated" his notes. In English, that means the judge suspected the racist bits were penciled onto the pad after the fact.

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In 1990, in a column titled "Open Mouth, Get in Paper," Barnicle wrote that lawyer Alan Dershowitz had said to him eight years earlier, "I love Asian women, don't you? They're ... they're so submissive." Dershowitz sued. Barnicle "stood by the quote." Dershowitz settled for $75,000.

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In a third suit, a landlord won an undisclosed settlement from the Globe after Barnicle wrongly described him as "exposing himself" to a tenant.

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In December 1991, Barnicle wrote a latter-day urban parable about Mary, a pregnant woman and her carpenter husband Joey, who purportedly showed up in town looking for a cheap bed and got mugged. Lovely idea. Only Mike Royko had done the "Mary & Joe, Chicago-style" piece every Christmas for 20 years. Royko didn't appreciate the "homage." He was already mad at Barnicle for pilfering a 1987 column idea: Ronald Reagan's "Iran-contra diary." Barnicle, like Royko, had Reagan "sending legs" to Iran.

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In late April 1992, Barnicle wrote a column about how a bunch of drunks were misdialing the number of a cab company at night and calling his house instead. His revenge, he said, was to pretend to be the dispatcher and insult the callers. Turns out, Royko had in fact gone through just such a hassle in the 1980s, leading to many funny columns about his subsequent battle with AT&T. ("A guy who works only three days a week ought to come up with his own ideas," Royko told interviewers.)

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Here, from March 1985, is one of the longest sentences ever run in the Boston Globe: "Correction: Because of reporting errors, it was erroneously stated in a Mike Barnicle column on Feb. 5 that a juvenile charged with robbery and attempted murder in a Dorchester shooting on Jan. 31 had in his possession at the time of his arrest a 'pocketful of .22 caliber bullets,' had a 'good, long' criminal record, was wanted for questioning in connection with two other recent armed robberies, and had been arraigned in Roxbury District Court as well as in Dorchester District Court."

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In 1991, Boston Magazine tried to find five people who formed the basis of two of Barnicle's formulaic hard-luck-love columns. One fellow, "Fat Jo-Jo Fallego," supposedly drove a truck for Fed-Ex. Despite the services of a private eye and vast new electronic databases, Boston Magazine had no luck. In fact, no person surnamed Fallego was found anywhere in the United States.

mikeylikesit wrote:
He's not yet President and should be working in the background, not out there feeding raw meat for partisan hacks to raise hell about.