Barney Frank and GOP Tactics

Barney Frank is one of my favorite Congressmen. He is courageous, always quotable, displays a great deal of integrity, and maintains his faith in liberalism. He also has consistently been on the receiving end of some of the most abject bigotry in modern political history because of his openly gay status.

The Boston Globe shows today how we can expect the gay baiting to rise even as Frank's status would under a Democratic House. It has already begun, with GOP leaders overtly and subtly casting aspersions on Frank's sexuality because that sort of thing too often works with the GOP base.

Across the country one can expect that the campaigning will only get uglier in the next two weeks as the Republicans see their grasp on power, so often wielded for power's sake, slip, and as Democrats see the chance to gain power, which many of them probably want for power's sake, within their reach. The GOP has ratcheted up the anti-gay and anti-immigrant (which too often floats into the territory of xenophobic and racist) bigotry, but it seems that these old saws will not be enough to overcome voter anger at a host of incompetencies.