There’s something absolutely fascinating going on in the coverage of the current banking crisis. One of the two (or three? Four?) banks at the center of the story has a really prominent former congressman on its board of directors — a co-architect of how the federal government regulates banks. He’s known for his acerbic comments, and he’s doing a bunch of interviews right now in a hasty effort at reputation management. But you really have to look around to find anyone who’s casting this congressman as a villain in this story; he’s being treated as a mildly ironic bystander to the whole mess…

If Barney Frank were a Republican, he would be the face of the current banking crisis. He would already be on the covers of magazines and the front pages of major newspapers, on television all the time, and the subject of condemning profile pieces. If Frank were on the right, he would be the villain of this story already, and ipso facto evidence of the greed, incompetence, malevolence, and recklessness of the GOP.

But Barney Frank is a Democrat who was widely admired by his party when he was in Congress, so you’re not hearing a lot about him outside of the financial press, and when you are, the tone is more ironic than denunciatory. Juana Summers of NPR asked, “Those are rollbacks you supported. Are you having second thoughts about that now?” (Apparently Frank had asked Summers to not ask any questions that would require complicated or lengthy answers: “I asked you not to do this. I don’t know how much time is time left, but I don’t like to be asked complicated questions.”)