Barney Frank: I’m a victim of the media!

Didn’t Barney Frank win his race?  In this train wreck of a victory speech, Frank spent more time attacking the media and his opponent, Sean Bielat, than most losing candidates do in conceding their races.  Its closest analogue, in my recollection, is Richard Nixon’s ultimately premature “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore” valediction in 1962, after losing the California gubernatorial election.  Frank gripes about Fox News, the Boston Herald, and the victimization of his significant other James Ready after Ready started popping up at Bielat events like an annoying paparazzo.  Guess what Frank blames for coverage of Ready’s odd decision to suddenly take up photojournalism? Three guesses and the first two don’t count:

Update: A good question from the comments: do I actually expect readers to sit through 10 minutes of Barney Frank?  Heck, when this got sent to me, I didn’t expect me to sit through it all, either.  Once it gets started, it has a certain train-wreck quality to it that kept me hanging on until it finished.  It’s a bit like watching Battlefield Earth all the way through to see if it actually gets worse, and in both cases, yes it does.

Update II: Howie Carr at the Boston Herald reminds Frank not to pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel or pixels by the terabyte:

Now, we know one of Barney’s big problems with this newspaper is that reporter Dave Wedge videotaped his partner, James Dude Ready, giving the needle to Sean Bielat after a debate a couple of weeks ago. Wedge rolled tape. In Barney’s world this is bias and vitriol.

See, no one is supposed to say anything about Barney. Certainly the Globe treats him with kid gloves. For example, he’s present at a house in Maine with marijuana plants growing, but he doesn’t know what marijuana looks like. He used to live with a male prostitute named Hot Bottom, but you can’t mention that either, because it’s homophobia. And then there was Barney’s former partner, Herb Moses, who made a six-figure salary at Fannie or Freddie – I can never remember which.

Personally, I thought a defeat yesterday would have been great for Barney. At age 70, it would have given him a chance to do something he hasn’t done since he was 18.

Work at a real job.

No kidding, I’ll bet you thought he’d never had a real job. But this was an added bonus of the Bielat campaign — we learned more about Barney’s briefest of careers in the working world. See, he had to put out a campaign biography in which he claimed he once worked in what was called in the Eisenhower era a “filling station.”

You want to talk irrelevant? How about an over-the-hill back-bencher whose district is just crying out to be eliminated in the upcoming redistricting?

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