The Far Right Finds A Useful Idiot To Go After Barney Frank For Their TV Cameras

There was something visceral in me that just positively grated when I saw that the little monkey the GOP got to regurgitate its anti-Barney Frank talking points at Harvard the other night was wearing a yarmulke. Back when I was in college, it was still close enough to the far right's attempted extermination campaign against Jews so that you could hardly expect to see a Jew rise up and attack a progressive on behalf of an extreme right wing faction or party. The extreme right has been mounting a slanderous and coordinated attack on the most effective Democrat in Congress-- and Joel Pollak sold himself to their cause.

As Media Matters demonstrated yesterday Republican Party spokesmen like Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Joe Scarborough, Greta van Susteren, Brian Kilmeade and Rush Limbaugh are working diligently to create a false impression that Barney was unwilling or unable to help in the little monkey's sincere quest for knowledge. Faux News' extensive coverage, of course, leaves out the entire context of the event: Barney thoroughly explaining the roots causes of the financial meltdown-- financial institutions which securitized mortgages without maintaining a financial stake, rating companies which gave high ratings to toxic assets, the Bush Regime's shady decision to require Fannie and Freddie to increase purchase of securitized loans of less qualified (i.e. subprime borrowers), companies like AIG which sold credit default swaps to insure risky assets without maintaining even close to enough capital to back them up, widespread speculation in credit default swaps, etc.

Faux was there but not for that. They were there to film the trained monkey ask his question, a de facto accusation disguised as a question, about Barney being the cause of the failure of Freddie and Fannie to sufficiently regulate, as if the Bush Regime was taking their walking order from Barney Frank. Instead, the record is really clear that from 1995 until the Democrats took over the House in January of 2007, Republicans blocked efforts to regulate anything and everything to do with Big Business, and particularly banksters, insurance, subprime mortgages as well as Fannie and Freddie. And somehow Faux News forgot to mention in their hysterical coverage that the only real legislation to regulate Fannie or subprime mortgages came when he became Chairman of the Financial Services Committee and the GOP moved into obstructionist mode, doing their best worst as a party to prevent sane regulatory policies from being enacted.

The Republican Party talking points on Hate Talk Radio and cable TV are that it was Fannie and Freddie-- and not the Wall Street banksters-- which were the primary culprits in the crisis. Insofar as Freddie and Fan were guilty, it was in carrying out orders from the boss-- the Bush Regime-- and that came after Wall Street had gone off on its catastrophic subprime binge. The GOP wants voters to forget the venal banksters, forget Wall Street, forget their own ideological fealty to deregulation, forget that they ever called the shots in Washington or were ever responsible for anything. And what they most fear is that Barney will be the intellectual engine behind passing much-needed reforms for Wall Street that the Republicans blocked while they were in power, and which they continue to oppose today. For the right, this is not an abstract argument-- the survival of their worldview-- and of their millions of dollars in payoffs from the finance/insurance real estate sector--is at stake.

Now, back to monkey boy for a moment. Since he seems so determined to disgrace Jews with his willingness to shill for the far right, maybe he should take his cues from a well know group related to the Republican Party. Another young Jewish man, an Australian, decided to join up and apparently had less luck than Mr. Pollak. Watch: