Barney, we knew ye too well

By Michael J. Smith on Tuesday April 17, 2012 10:02 PM

So Barney Frank is retiring -- not a minute too soon -- and he has favored us with a highly readable and revealing Checkers speech. I know about this because a Lefty friend of mine -- call him Sylvanus -- passed it along, and unless I misread his email, he seemed to think that Barney had something valuable -- as opposed to something merely revealing -- to say.

One really doesn't know whether to be more pleased or dismayed. There are reasons to be pleased; Barney's yenta-ish anger at his "base" is immensely delightful. "After all I've done for you kids, and this is the thanks I get...!"

And then of course one is always secretly delighted by the follies of one's friends, no matter how much one likes them. To paraphrase who, Rochefoucauld?

But there's room for dismay too. One had not realized just how conservative and conventional Sylvanus is.

Or maybe it was just a bad day.

Here's a bit of Barney the resentful dinosaur, regretting the days of consensus media -- that's the way it is, folks, as Walter Krankheit used to say:

Twenty years ago, people had a common set of facts that they read. They read opinion journalists, but they got their information generally from newspapers and from broadcasts.

Now, the activists live in parallel universes, which are both separate and echo chambers for each. If you’re on the left, you listen to MSNBC, you go to the blogs, Huffington Post, et cetera, and you basically hear only what you agree with. If you’re on the right, you watch Fox News and the talk shows, and you hear only what you agree with.

When we try to compromise, what you find is not people simply objecting to the specific terms of the compromise, but the activists object even to your trying to compromise, because they say, “Look, everybody I know agrees with us, so why are you giving in?”

Oh go fuck yourself, Barney, and long past time.

Still, the whole thing is well worth reading. It's amazing how entitled and superior the guy obviously feels, merely because he occupied a seat from a carefully gerrymandered rotten borough in Massachusetts for thirty years, and provided occasional comic relief for his colleagues from time to time.

Comments (15)

"When we try to compromise, what you find is not people simply objecting to the specific terms of the compromise, but the activists object even to your trying to compromise, because they say, “Look, everybody I know agrees with us, so why are you giving in?”"

Perhaps that's because all compromises these days are between the Far Right and the Fascist Right. Everyone to the left is, well, left out.

Feh.

sk:

Why not refer to your friend as Brunellus the next time he brings similar glad tidings?

Christopher:

History is over and done with, progress is at an end, and time has stopped moving forward.

I say this because America's golden age is perpetually 20 years in the past, and it's always 20 years in the past, no matter what that lying bitch the calendar says.

Look, I'm not an expert in the history of news reporting. Perhaps there really was a time when the news was sage and impartial, carefully considering every angle and giving all sides of an issue time to talk about it.

What I can tell you is that that golden age definitely was NOT 1992.

RELATED: via Whatever it is, I'm against it, I learned that one of the LA times' headlines of just over 100 years ago, dealing with the IWW, was “Hoboes in Marching Order. Enemies of Toil and Order Invade Fresno En Route to San Diego.”

Everybody had the same set of facts my ass.

Op:

Why the application of yet more tarnish on the Barney one ?

Checkers as in
The drive thru fast food chain?

"I'll have the foot long and a large butt shake "

Dem-pwogs have no respectable coats these days
But why pile on?

They are ..after all our first cousins

I wish mr Frank a hedonious after life
And maybe A visit or two in the wee hours
from the ghost of mrs roosevelt

Oh the succubus she'd make !

op:

drunk

read the contribution of krugman--cum S.O.--
to the pwog elite's fossil leagion's
compendium
called i think "occupy this " or something

http://politics.salon.com/2012/04/15/economy_killers_inequality_and_gop_ignorance/singleton/

its fun
in brief

he blames the GOP for the rightward charge
of the last 40 years

err ever since the great McGovern massacre

not the jack asses
hee haw !!11 heee haw !!!!

a free hand to set policy by the official corporate party
and it's not the loyal oppostions fault ?

hee haw !!!! hee haw !!!

michael yates:

I grew up in a small factory town in the 1950s and early 1960s. Never learned a fucking thing in school. Newspaper was worthless. Everything was bullshit. And this was the U.S.'s golden age. We did a minstrel show in high school in 1960. Never learned anything about the civil rights movement. Barney Frank is a hack and so full of shit it's coming out of his ears. Ever see how the media portrayed the Great Uprising of 1877? Put guns in the hands of protestors and printed that.

MJS:

Brunellus != Sylvanus

sk:

I guess not...it's just that his maintenance of hope℠ in Barney through the years reminded me of the results of 8 years of study in Paris...

Op:

MY

I submit leaning about the trail of tears and the Great 1877 railroad strike

Are far more informing and entertaining if learned anywhere else but one of our public schools

Can you imagine the treatment ?
As the movie types call the "flesh out "

Of course nowadays
there is a peoples narrative aspect in the authorized texts
used in some of our schools
might as well be the work of walt Disney's maiden great niece


The difficult bit I think
Ages 13 To 18 are ideal for exposure to another portrait of America
And yet that is precisely the interval raw spirits and self composing souls get fed pages from the John Dewey two step

Op:

MY

I submit leaning about the trail of tears and the Great 1877 railroad strike

Are far more informing and entertaining if learned anywhere else but one of our public schools

Can you imagine the treatment ?
As the movie types call the "flesh out "

Of course nowadays
there is a peoples narrative aspect in the authorized texts
used in some of our schools
might as well be the work of walt Disney's maiden great niece


The difficult bit I think
Ages 13 To 18 are ideal for exposure to another portrait of America
And yet that is precisely the interval raw spirits and self composing souls get fed pages from the John Dewey two step

Op:

That wasn't even worth one posting

chomskyzinn:

"Twenty years ago, people had a common set of facts that they read." Mmmkay.

All just makes me weepy for the 1980s, my college days and after. Those wonderful days of consensus on the contras, Roberto D'Abuisson, the assassination of Romero, savaging programs for the poor, PATCO, apartheid.

Those lovely consensus days of Ronnie or Fritz, Poppy or Duke-in-tank, Rather-or-Bwokaw-or-Jennings (the latter actually ok in my book). Flora Lewis enlightening us from the op-ed page, alongside "Scotty" Reston. The liberation of Grenada! Nukes nukes everywhere!!

As Archie and Edith --- whose memory really does make me misty --- used to croon every Saturday night: "DOSE WERE DA DAAAAAAAYS!"

"its fun
in brief "

It's painful...

I'd actually already read that recently and I think I've got about the same opinion of it that you do.

Al Schumann:

He should be remembered as well for his masterwork, the Dodd Frank Act, a massive document that was somehow, miraculously, even sillier and more useless than Sarbanes Oxley. That took some doing. But the spirit of malign inefficacy came to his rescue and he triumphed.

In his retirement, I think he should go on speaking tours with Donald Rumsfeld, his peer in epistemological maundering. It would make an excellent freak show.

Op:

The Rum and Barney review
I like that

I'm beginning to consider possibly outlining a proposal to do a book
on
barn butt for sapphire press

More and more he seems to be a great attractor for all things Dembopwog
And political economical circa 1978 to 2008

Sadly his star bright stage has not survived
the repo market implosion and the lot plop

He is but a very dense cinder
If such a combo is possible

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