Score One for the Man From Uranus

Barney Frank is TV's Hero of the Week. And some extremely cool voguing kids. They're heroic too.

BY Dave White

August 21 2009 12:00 AM ET

The last couple weeks of summer are usually not the time when TV flips your head around and makes you say "Holy Cow!" every time you turn the thing on. The fall shows have yet to begin and August is usually considered a slow news month. I should, by rights, be cocooned in a dark, air-conditioned room paying attention to not much else besides getting caught up on episodes of Mad Men , season 2, so that I could then catch up with season 3, airing now and currently causing gay-hating viewers to freak out over a man-on-man sex scene. That ought to have totally occupied my free time until Labor Day and I could have more or less ignored everything else. As a be-suited, skinny-necktied member of the Joan Holloway Appreciation Society I believe it's my right. And I'm determined not to get left behind as the '60s roll on and the clothes become more and more sloppy. I mean, yes, this show revels in a period of American history before there were civil rights for people of color, women, and gays. But at least everybody looked really great.

Where was I? Oh, yes, saying things like "Holy Cow!" and continuing my flabbergastment (I know it's not really a word, but I just decided it was) at what passes for political discourse in this country. Because the slow news month became a volcanic news month over health care reform, a topic I'm sort of obsessed with right now. I'm obsessed with it because I can't believe I live in a country full of people who are so damn rock-stupid. And I know it's not nice to call people stupid. But they are. Stupid like rocks. Stupid rock-people who refuse to think or read or process information or weigh facts or know when they're being manipulated by big corporations. There's no other explanation for the wild antics I'm seeing on the news. We're feral animals determined to rip each other apart the first chance we get. And, of course, the minute the obnoxious, idiot hillbillies start screaming and calling a health care plan Nazi-like and drawing Hitler moustaches on pictures of Obama (it's easier to do that than spend a long time ironing the Klan outfit), that's the moment when our recently elected conservative Democrats back down and retreat into their shells.

Except Barney Frank, that big beautiful man from Uranus. (Rush Limbaugh's words, not mine, by the way -- but thank you for that one, Rush, because gay jokes about Uranus are never not funny, even when assholes like you belch them up.

Tags: Television