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28 August, 2009

Why I Adore Barney Frank

Crooks and Liars put together a video montage of Rep. Barney Frank's Dartmouth town hall - you remember, the one wherein he utterly annihilated that poor little fool who spouted her "Nazi policy" bullshit. She wasn't the only one stupid enough to stand up and utter right wing talking points. And she wasn't the only one Barney spanked hard.

Highlights:

Frank explains what deficit hawks should concern themselves with:

"I am struck by those who say, well, you don't care about the deficit. No, I do. I do care about the deficit. That's one of the reasons, not the only one, why I voted against the single most wasteful expenditure in the history of America. The Iraq war. If we hadn't gone to the war in Iraq, which I thought was a terrible mistake and voted against, we would have had more than enough money to pay for health care."

He argues with a "tenther" who thinks that Congress isn't authorized to provide health care for their citizens:

Frank: Do you think Medicare is unconstitutional, sir?

Teabagger: I think that Medicare needs to be reformed.

Frank: Do you think it's unconstitutional? You said that the Constitution doesn't give us the authority to do it, but Medicare was done. And, do you think Medicare is unconstitutional?

Teabagger: I think that Medicare needs to be reformed.

Frank: But you won't tell me whether you think it's unconstitutional, which you said--

Teabagger: I am not a Constitutional scholar-

Frank: Then why did you start off arguing about the Constitution?

That's really a fantastic exchange, where Frank digs an inch below the surface and finds nothing. He insists on having this questioner back up the rhetoric he cribbed off of Free Republic or wherever he got it, and the guy just couldn't do it.

Gorgeous. Elect this man to the Senate. We may have lost our Liberal Lion, and he can never be replaced - but a bulldog's not a bad backup.

1 comment:

  1. Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi have become regular targets for all sorts of spurious whackaloonery. I've always believed the reason for this has nothing to do with politics. Barney Frank is gay and Nancy Pelosi is a particularly strong, independent woman. As such, they are forcing a lot of cons to confront uncomfortable questions about their own masculinity - which scares the living shit out of them. You can't help wondering if William Kostric (the guy with the "tree of liberty" sign and the loaded pistol at the town hall meeting in New Hampshire), was actually trying to make a political statement or just trying to compensate for an embarrassing and fundamentally more common inadequacy.

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