Well, there is at least one sad aspect of Barney Frank’s upcoming retirement.  We won’t have the unhappy Massachusetts Democrat to kick around any more.  This guy is so ripe for ridicule.  It has been a lot of fun mocking his various statements, not to mention his juvenile reaction to the type of questions Republican politicians face on a daily basis.

“From his relatively petty transgressions related to his personal life,” write the editors of the National Review,

to his more consequential role in enabling Fannie and Freddie, Representative Frank personifies a great deal of what is wrong with American public life. Though a highly intelligent man, he made the wrong decisions at every turn, and compounded his policy errors with the petty and vindictive style of his politics.

Barney is, in short, an embarrassment. Now, I’m sure that if I scanned the various gay blogs, I would read numerous encomia to this prominent politician. Indeed, I received one such e-mail yesterday from a gay organization.

Instead of celebrating his career and lamenting his retirement, gay people should be cheering his departure.  Simply put, Barney is not a good role model for our community.  We should not want such a mean-spirited, petty man, wrong about so much, unwilling to admit his mistakes, childish in victory as a face of gay America.  That he will no longer be the most prominent gay politician is a good thing for gay America, a very good thing indeed.

RELATED: The Best Thing Barney Frank Could Do For Gay People . . .

UPDATE:  Indeed, even today, Barney demonstrates his juvenile inability to handle the type of questions Republicans face on a daily basis.   In the Washington Examiner, Charlie Spiering reports that the retiring Democrat “lashed out against the Today Show’s Savannah Guthrie this morning for asking ‘negative questions’ during an interview about his recent retirement announcement.”  (Read the whole thing — and watch the video.)

Interesting that Barney only gets tough questions from the MSM after he has announced his retirement.

This is the guy the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn once dubbed a “Minority Wit“?

Last night before bed, I caught these headlines on Yahoo! Note particularly the last one:

Seems the AP is eager to tie the GOP to the Solyndra scandal, even though its reporter found no evidence that the aide in question Gary Andres, staff director of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, had ever “worked on behalf of Solyndra” nor that he was “aware until recently that Dutko [the lobbying firm where he had once worked] had represented Solyndra in 2008.”

Seems the AP is trying to create the impression that the GOP too was involved in the short-sighted (and likely politically-motivated) administration decision to offer a half-billion dollar (and then some) loan guarantee to the “green energy” firm with ties to Obama administration officials and Democratic donors.

In attempting to tie a Republican to the Solyndra scandal, the AP (and the other news services which repost the article) are attempting to distract us from the real story, crony capitalism of the Obama White House where the cronies donate heavily to Democratic candidates, causes and campaign committees in exchange for federal largesse.

Just as “green energy” is at the heart of the administration’s corrupt crony capitalism, so is environmental zealotry perhaps the biggest source of burdensome federal regulations crafted during the Obama years.  Blogging about such regulations, the Obama Environmental Protection Agency’s decree that “America’s fleet of passenger cars and light trucks will have to meet an average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, a doubling of today’s average of about 27 mpg“, Jeffrey H. Anderson gets at the heart of the record of Obama record:

This represents nearly everything that’s bad about the Obama administration:  a disdain for the normal legislative process and the rule of law; a disregard for consumer choice; a commitment to intrusive government regulations that sap Americans’ liberty and empty their wallets; and a general arrogance that this administration, not the American people, knows best. (more…)

Apologies for the slow blogging.  Am spending time with some good Mormon friends in Utah.  And, no, they’re not trying to “cure” me.  They know I’m gay and have made me very welcome in their home, even allowing me to adopt their children as my niece as nephews.  Indeed, they have made me feel far more welcome than have many gay liberals upon learning I’m a conservative.

Anyway, as you can probably guess, I have much to say on the retirement of the unhappy Barney Frank.  The long and the short of it is that it is a very good thing for gay Americans.  We will no longer have this mean-spirited embarrassment as the most prominent gay politician in the country.  If we had a less biased media, reporters would note how frequently the Massachusetts Democrats has been wrong and journalists would ask him tough questions.  He has shown an obliviousness to the reality of the marketplace and the record of the Reagan era.  And has demonstrated a refusal to admit wrong and an arrogance about his critics.

He doesn’t seem to realize that this nation enjoyed an economic boom in the 1990s in no small measure to Senate Republicans’ success in filibustering the Clinton “stimulus” in 1993 and Bill Clinton’s compromises with such congressional Republicans as Newt Gingrich in the mid-1990s.

That said, I post this piece having just chanced upon this post on Drudge:

“For those unfamiliar,” writes Noel Sheppard in posting this,

Blake writes for the Post’s The Fix political blog, hence the moniker “Fix Aaron.”

What would one expect from a newspaper that only five months ago called for readers to sift through former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s email messages?

It therefore isn’t at all surprising they’d be looking for dirt on the current Republican presidential frontrunner.

Wonder if Mr. Blake or any of his Washington Post colleagues went looking for dirt on the Democratic presidential frontrunner in the 2008 campaign.

SOMEWHAT RELATED:  Wonder if anybody at Mr. Blake’s paper is tweeting for help in sifting through the recent White House Visitor Log Document Dump.