Say what you will about Barney Frank (and, undoubtedly, you will).  I'll simply note for the record that the congressman last night delivered a master class for his more timorous colleagues on how best to handle the town hall clowns. It's simple, really: Speak eloquently and slap them silly.

When some rebel without a clue showed up with a sign depicting President Obama in a Hitler mustache and demanded that Frank explain why he supported a "Nazi policy" on health care, his answer went like this:

"I'm going to revert to my ethnic heritage (Jewish), and answer your question with a question. On what planet do you spend most of your time?...As you stand there, with a picture of the president defaced to look like Hitler, and compare the effort to increase health care to the Nazis, my answer to you is, it is a tribute to the First Amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated."

But the ignorant don't always get the message, even when slapped silly. This one still sought an answer to her "Nazi policy" question, so she asked it again. That was when Frank delivered the priceless clincher:

»  More Thank you, Barney Frank

As the denizens of Afghanistan prepare to vote in tomorrow's presidential election (presumably defying threats by the Taliban to cut off their noses and ears), I couldn't help but wince at what Richard Holbrooke said the other day. During a Washington forum, President Obama's special envoy to the volatile region summed up the status of the war this way:

"The specific goal of the United States is really hard for me to address in specific terms. But I would say this about defining success in Afghanistan...We'll know it when we see it."

Good grief. How reassuring.

If Obama and his top foreign policy players can't communicate better than that - if they can't specify the goals, spell out the strategies for achieving those goals, and provide Congress with the metrics by which progress toward those goals can be measured - they could take a big political hit on the home front. Not right away, but quite possibly within a year.

»  More The politics of metrics

Poor Sal...If you're a devotee of Mad Men, the best show on television and one that may well rank with The Sopranos and The Wire by the end of its run, you'll surely get my reference. And even if you don't watch the show, you'll catch my drift from the context.

In Sunday's third-season debut, Salvatore Romano, the gay ad executive who seems fated, in still-repressive 1963, to suffer his personal secret in silence, nearly enjoyed a nocturnal encounter with a hunky bellhop in a Baltimore hotel. Unfortunately, the fire alarm went off - and that's when dapper Don Draper, his uber-heterosexual colleague, scrambled down the fire escape from his room upstairs and inadvertently saw Sal with the bellhop. The next day, on the plane back to New York, Draper, a steward of his own secrets, ostensibly asked Sal to sign on to a new ad slogan for the London Fog raincoat: "Limit your exposure." Sal nodded in silence. He got the metaphor, hence the advice.

It was one of those moments when you realize how much has changed in the ensuing 46 years. Today, Sal would be out at the office and Twittering about it. Indeed, the actor who plays Sal is gay, he came out more than a decade ago, and he lives with a guy in a long-term relationship.

Yet, even as things stand now, the actor and his companion can't jointly partake of the various federal rights and benefits currently available to opposite-sex couples. For instance, they can't jointly file federal taxes, or qualify for survivor benefits under Social Security. And if they were to get married in the handful of states where gay marriage is legal, their bond would be deemed invalid everywhere else, even though Article IV, Section One of the U.S. Constitution states: "Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State."

»  More Sal's world, 46 years later

Before we proceed with whatever comes next, attention shall first be paid to last week's announcement from Pennsylvania's most prominent conservative in exile, Rick Santorum.

Santorum said the other day: "I'm very concerned about the state of affairs in this country."

Translation to plain English: "I want to run for president in 2012. I'm looking at the other Republican candidates and I'm thinking, hey, why not me?"

Why not indeed. Thus guy might be worth watching.

»  More Rick Santorum, comeback kid?

Following up on yesterday's piece, varying the format...

"This Friday morning meeting of the Committee to Kill Health Care Reform will now come to order. Let's get a fill from our communications director. How are things going for us?"

"They're going terrific, Mr. Chairman. This 'death panel' BS has really caught on. These people in the town hall meetings really believe that the reform bill gives Obama the power to kill their grannies."

Much laughter around the table. The chairman shakes his head in bemusement: "It's amazing what we have accomplished, given the fact that the bill only talks about voluntary end-of-life counseling."

»  More The big lie

If the Founding Fathers could somehow have an inkling of the mob passions on display in the August town halls, they would be spinning in their graves.

Their entire philosophy of representative government was rooted in the knowledge that mobs, by definition, were too irrational and ignorant to be trusted. James Madison himself wrote in the Federalist Papers that the new nation should make it a high priority "to avoid the confusion and intemperance of a multitude. In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason."

In retrospect, of course, their opinion seems a tad elitist - until one beholds the current town hall scenes, with the mobs running wild (catnip for the cable TV networks), circulating the most insipid falsehoods, and applauding fellow mobbers whose vocal assertions about policy and government can most charitably be described (at least by quaint empirical standards) as clueless.

The examples are far too numerous to mention here, although, admittedly, I'm fascinated by the mobber who insisted, during Senator Arlen Specter's Tuesday meeting, that Big Brother intends to use the health care reform bill as an excuse to confiscate family wealth. To wit: “I have a question on page 58 and 59 of this bill, which gives the government access to private individual bank accounts at their free will.” (Huh? What?)

»  More James Madison was right

We tend to get so caught up in the news of the moment that even the recent past recedes all too quickly. But sometimes there is value in looking backward, if only to square accounts with history, to flesh out the details of events that seemed somewhat sketchy at the time - and to better determine whether the people in power lied to us.

The Bush administration ended just seven months ago, yet dipping into its archives already seems akin to tuning in an '80s rock station and hearing A Flock of Seagulls, or maybe The Thompson Twins singing "Hold Me Now." Nevertheless, this morning there are newsworthy reasons to blast the archival political music - if only to better determine whether the Bush people in power lied to us.

Well, they did. Their own sworn testimony and emails, harvested by the House Judiciary Committee and released yesterday, prove that they did.

This isn't about Iraq; those deceptions have been well documented for years. This about another scandal that has receded all too quickly, the Bush team's firing of nine U.S attorneys back in 2006 - known on this blog as the prosecutor purge scandal. The clear suspicion at the time was that the Bush team had seriously politicized the once-independent U.S. Justice Department, that federal prosecutors around the country were getting pressure to conduct themselves as partisan lackeys for the Republican party, and that their jobs were being jeopardized if they refused. And now, thanks to the release of 700 pages of sworn testimony and 5400 pages of emails, we have proof that this was indeed the Bush agenda.

»  More An oldie but goodie

In the immortal words of Yogi Berra, "it's deja vu all over again."

This morning, as I scanned a New York Times story about President Obama's "new playbook" for the health care debate, I was stopped by this paragraph:

"And Democratic Party officials enlisted in the fight by the White House acknowledged in interviews that the growing intensity of the opposition to the president’s health care plans — within the last week likened on talk radio to something out of Hitler’s Germany, lampooned by protesters at Congressional town-hall-style meetings and vilified in television commercials — had caught them off guard and forced them to begin an August counteroffensive."

Then, a few paragraphs later, a top Democratic communicator weighed in: "To be fair, I think we were probably a little surprised - just a little - at the use of swastikas and the comparisons to Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich that even Rush Limbaugh has fanned the flames on. And we were a little surprised at the mob mentality."

»  More "We were a little surprised"

Here's an expanded version of my Sunday print column on the impending Woodstick anniversary. The bah-humbug 'tude reads a tad stronger than originally intended, but, hey, these things happen...

Brace yourselves for yet another round of Woodstock overload. Next weekend marks the 40th anniversary of that mythical music mudfest, so naturally we’re getting eight new books, a new TV documentary, a new Hollywood movie, and a newly remastered DVD of the old documentary that will enable aging baby boomers to mourn their lost youth in high definition.

I’m not sure what has made me recoil from this contrived celebration – perhaps it’s the leather fringe on the DVD packaging, supposedly reminiscent of those late ‘60s jackets worn by young boomers who wanted to look like Buffalo Bill – but, as a certified boomer, I simply want to say:

Enough about us.

»  More Enough with the cosmic freight