03.19.09
Vulgarity works
Totalitarian socialists in past times at least had a sense of style. Those little caps that Lenin and Stalin wore. The simple little suit that Mao made his trademark. Fidel’s fatigues. The brand-identifying red-and-black color scheme of the Sandinistas.
The Freedom-Hater regime with its fingers currently on America’s throat have nothing so snappy. Its mode of dress is really not so different from the rest of us. What they rely on to advance their quest for public acceptance is pure vulgarity. Blatant lying and perversion is paraded before the nation’s television cameras with utter confidence that no one will give a damn.
Consider Barney Frank, he of the prostitute boyfriend who ran a zoo-sex ring out of Frank’s basement, he of the romantic involvement with a Fannie Mae executive while he sat on the committee overseeing the lending firm’s compliance with government requirements, he of the wads of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s lobbying arms.
Now this slug posing as a human being grills the head (since last September) of AIG, who was picked for the job by the damn government, when he was minding his own business running Allstate, demanding names of bonus-taking AIG executives. When Mr. Liddy expressed reluctance to provide such names, citing death threats in general and specifying one mentioning piano wire and the executives’ families, Frank dismissively and smugly respond that “everybody gets death threats.”
Then he has the gall to write a Huffington Post piece attempting to make his career in financial oversight look like some kind of crusade for fiscal responsibility. It’s full of convenient omissions, glossings-over, and uses of vague terms. Why, for instance, did Republican legislators and President Bush object to the bills Frank says he so passionately pushed? It’s hard to buy the premise that, per se, Pubs were against help for faith-based non-profits, for instance. If that’s all there is to that one, I’ll be the first to drop my jaw in shock.
But his record of lying about the state of health of Fannie and Freddie (”I don’t see anything to report that raises safety and soundness problems”) and his current attempt to smokescreen the W administration’s repeated attempts over eight years to reform these organizations is there for all to see. And therein lies the vulgarity. He doesn’t give a flying flip. It’s fine with him if the whole world knows the naked truth. He’s got the committe chairmanship and the access to the media. He can forge ahead with his designs and his Stalinist show-trial antics and no one can touch him.
On a different subject involving a different Freedom-Hater, vulgarity was on full display yesterday in San Francisco yesterday. Nancy Pelosi, speaking in St. Anthony’s, a Catholic church, when she is on the outs with her archbishop and indeed the Pope for claiming that the Church is cool with killing people who aren’t born yet, said that raids to enforce the nation’s immigration laws are un-American.
Words fail one.
Then there’s TCM’s appearance on The Tonight Show, debasing the office he holds even more than he already has.
There is a level on which we the citizenry are complicit in all this. Vulgarity works. What does that say about our present state?
