Twelve years of primary education at the hands of the Dominican sisterhood left me with a permanent tic against explicit vulgarity, but sometimes the truth can only be expressed rudely. Only an arsehole Media Village Idiot could have written “Barney the Bully“:
… The amiable [Savannah] Guthrie tried again. How does he feel about the worsening tone in Washington?
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“Well, you exemplify what I think is a change in the tone,” Frank said. “You’ve managed to ask all sort of negative questions. . . . It’s ‘gotcha’ journalism. It’s ‘gotcha’ politics. And it does lessen our chances to get things done.”
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The interviewer gave it a final attempt. Does Frank “feel any responsibility for your own role in, kind of, that tone that we do see in Washington?”
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“Well, congratulations,” Frank said with derision. “You’re four-for-four in managing to find the negative approach.”
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It was a chance for the nation to see what so many in the Capitol had seen up close over the years: That Barney Frank, liberal lion, gay pioneer and respected legislator, is also one mean and ornery S.O.B….
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The Republican strategist Karl Rove, writing on FoxNews.com, welcomed the retirement of the “petulant, abrasive and downright nasty” Frank. Rove, who knows something about nastiness, wrote: “Brilliant, but acid tongued and generally unpleasant, Mr. Frank ruled with an iron gavel, ran over critics with delight and treated committee members and especially Republican colleagues as lesser forms of life.”
Congressman Frank is a smart, skillful legislator who’s spent his life working to pass the best laws possible, even when it meant compromising with proudly ignorant know-nothings, most of them registered as Republicans. Savannah Guthrie is a professional blonde talking head paid for her talents at mouthing partisan right-wing talking points while always remaining “amiable“. Karl Rove is a highly-paid thug who’s done his considerable best to degrade his own party’s standards — such as they ever were — during a career of lying, back-biting, ratfucking, theft, and every other form of white-collar criminality going back to his college days as a Young Republican at the end of the 1960s. Pretending that Frank’s inability to suffer fools gladly has been worse for public civility than Rove’s long campaign against honesty in politics, or embracing our major media’s craven pretense that calling someone a liar in front of a recording device is worse than being a liar, is gutless, dishonest, and behavior unworthy of a well-paid, well-educated individual with the distribution and readership of one of the national papers of record, Mr. Millbank.
