How Barney Frank Got Rear Ended

It just happens. You're sitting at a red light  minding your own business when all of a sudden out of a clear blue sky - BAM! - somebody ass-ends you, and not in a manner that you're accustomed to. Only too late do you realize that you were stting there day dreaming while the light changed.

It couldn't happen to a more deserving guy...

From the Boston Herald:

Barney Frank has always been the smartest guy in the room — just ask him.

As for Eddie Markey, well, let’s just say that he isn’t — even if the room is a broom closet and the only other thing in it is a mop.

So here’s the irony: Barney Frank, so arrogant, so full of himself, so intoxicated by decades of fawning media coverage, just assumed that he would be taken care of in redistricting by the peons in the Legislature.

Meanwhile, Fast Eddie was sucking up to these same below-average solons. Markey may not be the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, but he was smart enough to remember Tip O’Neill’s old adage about how you have to ask for every vote.

[...]Barney got caught flat-flooted. He didn’t wake up until the sky was dark with chickens coming to roost. To quote Oscar Wilde: It would take a heart of stone not to laugh.

“They didn’t do me any favors,” Barney said. But why would they?

He hadn’t cultivated any of the newer reps; he probably still only knew a handful. The other congressman who got his way at Barney’s expense was Steve Lynch of South Boston and there’s another ironic twist for you.

For years Southie’s Senate President Billy Bulger unsuccessfully tried to wreck Barney’s career, in both legislative and congressional redistricting. But now, all these years later, Steve Lynch, the guy who ended the Bulger dynasty in Southie, now takes care of his old foe’s final unfinished piece of business.

Apparently when the state reps sliced up the electoral pie, poor Barney didn't get a big enough piece. He finally woke up at the wheel but by then it was too late.

At the end, Barney realized he was in a jam and begged for all of Fall River. But that would have required some shifts on the Irish Riviera. Lynch, backed by his own surrogate, Rep. Mike Moran of Brighton, refused to give up any of the South Shore. He had fashioned the perfect district for himself, shorn of minorities and heretics (Needham) and what did he owe Barney?

Nobody owes Frank anything. Quite the opposite; Frank should be investigated and imprisoned for poisoning the financial industry and leaving the retirement plans of millions of people in ruins.

But Barney will retire in style. Here is his luxury yacht tied up in Boston Harbor.