This Doesn't Compute, Mike!

Mike Barnacle is a veteran print and broadcast journalist, who has written nearly 4,000 columns collectively for New York Daily News, Boston Herald, Newsweek, and The Boston Globe, where he rose to prominence with his biting, satirical, and at times, heart-wrenching columns that closely followed the triumphs, travails and ambitions of Boston’s working and middle classes.

In a piece entitled, "McCAIN AT SUNSET," on the Huffington Post, Barnacle bemoans what he believes has happened to John McCain, clearly a man Mike once admired.

Here's Mike Barnacle:

"It is a sad story: a proud and independent man permits a handful of advisers to take his hard-earned reputation and alter it to such an extent that the original is now hard to recognize, nearly invisible behind a curtain of cynical ads and the preposterous pronouncements of a woman whose candidacy is an insult to intelligence."

What you're saying doesn't make sense, Mike, it doesn't compute. As a sociologist and psychotherapist for 30 years, I can tell you that a "proud and independent man" doesn't somehow morph into a petty, snarling opportunist, regardless of the influence of handlers or the level of misguided ambition. What does happen, especially when you get older, is that the facade, the mask, the "persona," as Carl Jung called it, breaks down, and the raw, unhealed parts of yourself become visible. This is who John McCain always was underneath, festering, seething and self-righteous. The "Maverick" was a fascinating cover that we all liked, but it was not real.

James Garner played "Maverick" once, too, Mike, but it was only a TV show.