Mike Barnicle reuses and recycles

Over at his blog, Media Nation, media critic Dan Kennedy pokes fun at ex-Globe columnist Mike Barnicle's foray into blogging. Yesterday, Barnicle published an item at The Huffington Post. It seems he was in Philadelphia, where he saw Obama and Clinton gives speeches in which Iraq was hardly mentioned, so he thought he'd remind us all that young men from Philadelphia have died in both Iraq and Vietnam.

"I spent a morning last week looking for Francis Xavier Kane on his anniversary even though I knew he was gone, lost all those years ago, exactly 40, when he was killed April 21, 1968 a few miles west of a lethal place called Quang Tri City in a country called Vietnam," Barnicle writes.

Kennedy says he's read Barnicle's column already:

Not to denigrate the memory of the soldier who died, Francis Xavier Kane. But Barnicle's been writing this column since at least the 1980s. In Barnicle's hands, these maudlin exercises invariably involve the use of the phrase "a place called," an attempt to imbue his sentimental ramblings with a Hemingwayesque touch of manful dignity.

Kennedy then goes on to quote nearly 20 Barnicle columns using the same turn of phrase. For example:

"He was killed in a firefight exactly two years ago at a place named Tuwayhah in a country called Iraq. He was 25." (Boston Herald, April 14, 2005)

"It is a letter, a letter written on Memorial Day of that year from a place called Khe Sanh in a country called Vietnam." (Boston Globe, May 30, 1983)

I love the smell of a keyword search in the morning.