Morning Joe’s Mike Barnicle Calls Decorated Combat Vet a ‘Kid’

Frequent Morning Joe guest Mike 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 for the Daily Beast on Sunday in an article hilariously titled “Why is the GOP So Angry at Everything These Days?”

Barnicle somehow managed to use that title while displaying leftist rage, calling prominent Republicans all sorts of names and accusing them of all sorts of character flaws.

For example, Barnicle says Harvard law grad Senator Ted Cruz’s “fury” derives from his “massive ego and outsized ambition along with his 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.”

Hard-line conservatives mentally ill? That sounds a teensy bit angry.

Next: “The minor league Cruz, the tough talking, totally in-over-his-head governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker.”

Barnicle’s rage continues, 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, whom he calls “Bombs Away” 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.”

Barnicle adds, “Twelve years later things are really going well there.” True, thanks to a certain someone who pulled the troops out, losing the war we had won.

According to CNN, Barnicle did not just plagiarize once, but at least twice. Once, he allegedly used jokes by George Carlin, and the Boston Phoenix said he copied portions of a 1986 column from a 1961 book by journalist A.J. Liebling.