Post Boston Bombing, Barney ‘Frank’ly Speaks — and Does Us All a Favor

For that teeny-weeny faction of sentient conservatives tempted to romanticize the now-expired congressional tenure of Barney Frank, I have some good news: His recent reflections on the Boston Marathon terror-bombing obnoxiously remind us why we shouldn’t be anything less than euphoric that the former Massachusetts representative has retired from political life. 

Less than one day after the Bean Town horror, Frank head-scratchingly volunteered to CNN, ” It is very fashionable in America … to criticize government, to belittle public employees, talk about their pensions, talk about what people think is their excessive health care —  here we saw government in two ways perform very well … I never was, as a member of Congress, one of the cheerleaders for less government, lower taxes. No tax cut would have helped us deal with this or will help us recover.”

The sixteen-term congressman’s post-bombing analysis is the kind of Crayola-level reasoning he and his cronies regularly ascribe to Neanderthal “right-wingers“. It prompts a question: Has the openly homosexual Frank’s advocacy of sodomy corroded his ability to think clearly on other matters, as well?

It’s not that Barney Frank is stupid, per se. He’s certainly glib, and probably commands an intelligence of the technical/high-IQ variety. It’s just that in the shoe-leather prudence department that he’s a shouting fool.

Frank’s malfeasance, of course, long predates this latest bizarrity: recall his sordid, mid-1980’s involvement with, and misuse of office for, housemate , aide and male prostitute/pimp Steve Gobie (this earned him an official House reprimand).The ex-Fourth-District representative figures centrally in the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac melt down which ignited 2007’s economic collapse — a financial implosion from which America is still limpingly finding its way. And, for decades, the perpetually peevish Frank, a doctrinaire Lefty who insolently rode every Liberal hobby-horse prancing down the progressive pike, has elevated indignant pomposity to an art form.

All this, mind you,  well before his January 2013 departure from Massachusetts’ congressional delegation and weird CNN commentary on April 15th’s bloody Boston atrocity. 

It makes decent people feel goose-pimply all over again that Barney Frank is a retired congressman, doesn’t it? 

Neither is this reaction merely academic. Dialed-in political and cultural conservatives held their collective breath when Frank’s name was prominently floated — he explicitly made himself available, in fact — to temporarily fill Senator John Kerry’s seat, lately vacated when he became Barack Obama’s Secretary of State.

Thankfully, that possibility never came to pass; but — Barney Frank, the Return? Senator Barney Frank? Brrrrrr — even the prospect makes sensible patriots shudder. 

By the way, don’t put it past the voters of the Bay State, or their Obama-sycophant governor Deval Patrick,  to find a way to re-install the fifteen-times-re-elected congressman to some kind of tax-payer-supported perch. That commonwealth, after all, has been inflicting statist reprobates and scoundrels on the rest of the nation for eons. 

Still,  out to political pasture though he presently may be, Barney Frank quickly found his way into last week’s main-event —  in this case, spouting big-government twaddle in the aftermath of this terrorist outrage. Shades of Bill Clinton, another decommissioned pol who won’t go away. Like a pestiferously recurring rash they both keep turning up to bother us. 

Make no mistake, these two stains on the American polity aren’t mere irritants, avert-your-gaze embarrassments to an electorate that repeatedly promoted them to high-places. They don’t just pose a menace as individual peddlers of government-bloating, Constitution-shredding, virtue-obliterating influence.

No, no, Barney and Bill embody a comprehensive and poisonous ideology overtaking vast swaths of American society on every front. It’s a worldview which is exhausting our Republic’s coffers and, more grievously, whatever withering store of national rectitude we still possess. Frank’s pimping out the Boston Marathon attack to crassly boost the Democratic line — more government, more spending, more Leftist nostrums —  is simply a recent example.