This should be fun. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) has a very well-known opponent in next week’s Democratic primary, who he’s faced before under different circumstances: Rachel Brown, the LaRouche activist who confronted him in a famous town hall exchange in August 2009.
Brown was the one who got up and asked Frank why he was supporting Obama’s “Nazi policy” on health care, while she and her compatriots were also name-dropping LaRouche and bearing a picture of Obama with a Hitler mustache. Frank — who being both gay and a Jew, is a member of at least two groups that the Nazis sent to the death camps — shot back: “On what planet do you spend most of your time?” He also added: “My answer to you is, as I said before, it is a tribute to the First Amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated.”
Next week, she’ll be facing Frank on the Democratic primary ballot. “I didn’t realize at the time that if you had a better idea, you should take their seat,” Brown told the Associated Press.
Meanwhile, the 30-year incumbent Frank is taking a particularly dismissive view of his latest challenger. “I regard her as an example of the price you pay for free speech,” Frank said. “I don’t think she is very rational.”
Eric Kleefeld
Eric Kleefeld joined TPM as an intern for the final months of the 2006 midterm elections, and then kept showing up for work. His other interests include guitars, old comic books and the politics of various English-speaking countries.
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