Barney Frank: In the Right for Once

I watched some longer segments of Congressman Barney Frank's Tuesday night town hall meeting and, I never thought I would say this, but Frank was right in the way he dealt with many of the questions.

I watched some longer segments of Congressman Barney Frank's Tuesday night town hall meeting in Dartmouth, MA and I never thought I would say this but Frank was (okay, deep breath now Brad) right.  As I wrote the other day, the town hallers are not lunatics and nut jobs.  They are concerned citizens.  But then I saw Mr. Frank's town hall and I was reminded that some are still out there nonetheless.

Now, the right wing talk radio crew and even Fox (for whom I do commentary on the business network) has done a crafty bit of editing to make it look like Mr. Frank was rude, dismissive and intellectually condescending to his constituents who "voted him in."  But if anyone saw longer clips of the meeting which included not just Frank's answers, but also some of the questions as well as the audience's outbursts, one may come to several conclusions regarding this meeting at least:  1) These people were probably among the few in his district who did not cast their vote for him; 2) there were indeed a few crackpots and zealots in mix; 3) Frank was absolutely correct in the way he dealt with many of the questions, and gave them the level of respect they deserved.

Here is one example being touted in anti-Frank circles as an example of his arrogance. I give it to you now with the question attached:

Constituent: "Why do you continue to support a Nazi policy [on healthcare] as Obama has expressly supported this policy?  Why are you supporting it?"

Frank:  "When you ask me this question I am going to revert to my ethnic heritage and answer your question with a question: 'On what planet do you spend most of your time? You want me to answer your question, and you stand there with a picture of the President defaced to look like Hitler [woman proudly holds up said defaced picture] and compare the effort to increase healthcare to the Nazis.  My answer to you as I said before is it is a tribute to the First Amendment that this kind of vile contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated. Ma'am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it."

Good for him.  Just imagine this is a Republican congressman debating a woman holding up a picture of George Bush with a Hitler mustache denouncing the Iraq war and calling it a Nazi-like act of aggression? Comparing Bush's liberation of Iraq with Operation Barbarossa for example is as ludicrous a moral nexus as comparing Obama's healthcare plan to Hitler's systematic extermination of the "untermenchen."  As a Jew, Mr. Frank had every right to put that woman who has little historical grounding in her place and I say good for him.   Any such comparison, from any loon segment is insulting to the millions of true victims of Nazi atrocities and should be denounced as such.

Now, as I have made clear before I am no fan of Barney Frank.  And there were times at the podium when he appeared to be condescending, even though many of the questioners in my mind deserved his indignation -- such as those he rightfully observed could not see the difference between state and federal taxes.  But I think the coverage of this was one-sided from talk radio and some of the cable news outlets.  It made for good ratings, but it was not the whole truth.  And that is not fair to Mr. Frank or the debate as a whole for that matter.

Frank at one point told a woman that she had come to the town hall with preconceived notions and nothing he said was going to change her mind about him or his policies.  I think the cable news outlets also had their minds made up about how to play this story before the first question was ever asked.