A reader sends along a campaign fundraising plea from Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee:
In the coming months, I will be the target of a national right-wing fund drive. The right will use this money to lie, distort and misrepresent.
Here is an example. Last fall, John Fund, a member of the extremely conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board, claimed that I supported legislation on "universal voter registration" which he said was part of a scheme to win elections fraudulently. This was a lie – no such bill even exists – but Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and others repeated this fiction to an audience of tens of millions. ...
I am a target because of my role in advancing a progressive agenda. As Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, I am working to pass sweeping legislation to reform Wall Street. Yet hard-core conservatives still believe that markets are self-regulating and they deny that Wall Street bears substantial responsibility for the economic crisis. Instead, they launch another lie -- that it was caused by a liberal plot in which I personally forced Wall Street to give mortgages to people who could not afford them.