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Posted on 11/29/2011 6:12:16 AM PST by markomalley
Oh, that lovable rascal, Barney Frank! He may have been opinionated (and boy did he let you know what he felt!) but he was always looking for a way to solve problems. We need more people like him in Washington.
That's the official liberal mainstream media line on the retiring congressman from Massachusetts, and it tells us more about the media than about Barney Frank. The encomia to the man pour forth from admiring reporters from the New York Times to the Washington Post to Slate. They almost all ignore entirely Frank's role in subsidizing the housing bubble, his coziness with the very industry he was regulating, his million-dollar investments in an industry he worked to boost.
And of course, the liberal mainstream ignore or gloss over the fact that Barney Frank was censured by the House of Representatives for fixing parking tickets and writing a misleading memo to Virginia probation figures. These actions were to protect the male prostitute Frank had hired for sex, but then later hired for other duties, paying him under the table without paying withholding or Social Security taxes.
This blog post at the New York Times, the hub of Frank sanitization, describes the house censure this way:
Much of the animus against Mr. Frank from the right stems from his advocacy of gay rights, and his 1990 reprimand for hiring his roommate as a personal aide.
That's like describing John Ensign's sex scandal -- sleeping with his chief-of-staff's wife and then trying to pay the couple to be quiet -- as a matter of him finding a new job for his chief of staff.
Dave Weigel at Slate has a piece about Frank being "at home in the culture wars," and quotes him saying to gay marriage opponents, "Are your relations with your spouses of such fragility that the fact I have a committed, loving relationship with another man jeopardizes them?”
Setting aside Frank's disingenous wording there -- and disingenous wording was a staple of his bullying style -- it seems that Frank's relationships with men did matter, when those men were running prostitution rings out of his house, or when he was getting them jobs at a housing-bubble-inflating Government Sponsored Enterprise Frank was supposed to be regulating, but was instead trying to protect from all regulation.
Much of the coverage of Frank's retirement glosses over the unethical blending of his sex life and his congressional privileges. That might be because Frank is gay, and bringing up his sex-related scandals seems like gay-bashing to mainstream liberal reporters. Sex scandals are only relevant if you're conservative or a Christian, I guess.
I am surprised that Bawney is actually being gerrymandered out of a seat. I thought the only congressional districts in MA were left or even more left.
Let Barney practice his chosen profession in jail.
Gotta love that fair and unbiased MSM.../s
You're gonna need a bigger Douche Bag!
Barney Frank, another contribution to society from the bowels of Harvard. Al Qaeda only wishes they could produce the amount of psychotic radicals as that insane asylum posing as a College
Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner! Today’s winner in the STUMP THE CHUMP CONTEST is Timothy P. Carney with his word “encomia”. Timothy wins high praise for using that word!
That’s a headline guaranteed to elicit shudders.
Freep-mail me to get on or off my pro-life and Catholic List:
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I find it interesting that Barney Frank announced that he will NOT run for reelection, only a day or so before the arrest of a prominent former Sheriff in Colorado (who a friend in Denver suggests was part of a group that traded meth for sex with young gay men). I can’t help but wonder if Barney had any connections in Denver - but of course, it’s probably just a coincidence.
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