The title of this post was originally going to be, “What’s wrong with Barney Frank?” But I have come into some information that has answered my question.

I don’t know whether you saw this the other day, but Barney Frank, the longtime liberal congressman from the Boston area, offered an interesting explanation as to why Republicans were up in arms about what has happened at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

Keep in mind when you read this that Frank has long held an influential position—either as chairman or ranking member—of the House Financial Services Committee, which has oversight of Freddie and Fannie, so he would presumably know if something was amiss in their mortgage dealings.

“(Republicans) get to take things out on poor people,” Frank said at a mortgage foreclosure symposium in Boston. “Let’s be honest: The fact that some of the poor people are black doesn’t hurt them either, from their standpoint. This is an effort, I believe, to appeal to a kind of anger in people.”

Is Barney Frank accusing the GOP of having racist policies?

It sure seems that way to me.

Whoa, I thought; that’s a wild and crazy explanation for everything that’s happened. Talk about going off the reservation!

Later in the story, Frank explains that he was powerless to do anything about the impending crisis:

“If I could have stopped a Republican bill during the Bush years, I would have started with the war in Iraq. Then I would have gone to the Patriot Act. Then I would have gone on to the hundreds of millions in tax cuts,” said Frank, to applause from the audience.

In other words, even in hindsight, intervening in the mortgage industry wouldn’t have been anywhere near the top of Barney Frank’s to-do list, even though the crisis has now crippled the U.S. economy and is dragging down world markets with it.

Why?

Enter this article from Bill Sammon, Fox News’ Washington deputy managing editor:

Unqualified home buyers were not the only ones who benefitted from Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank’s efforts to deregulate Fannie Mae throughout the 1990s.

So did Frank’s partner, a Fannie Mae executive at the forefront of the agency’s push to relax lending restrictions.

Now that Fannie Mae is at the epicenter of a financial meltdown that threatens the U.S. economy, some are raising new questions about Frank’s relationship with Herb Moses, who was Fannie’s assistant director for product initiatives. Moses worked at the government-sponsored enterprise from 1991 to 1998, while Frank was on the House Banking Committee, which had jurisdiction over Fannie.

Frank is the first openly gay member of Congress:

“I am the only member of the congressional gay spouse caucus,” Moses wrote in the Washington Post in 1991. “On Capitol Hill, Barney always introduces me as his lover.”

The two lived together in a Washington home until they broke up in 1998, a few months after Moses ended his seven-year tenure at Fannie Mae, where he was the assistant director of product initiatives. According to National Mortgage News, Moses “helped develop many of Fannie Mae’s affordable housing and home improvement lending programs.”

Really.

But wait! There’s more!

Republicans weren’t the only ones thwarted in their attempts to regulate industries that came under Frank’s congressional oversight jurisdiction:

Although Frank now blames Republicans for the failure of Fannie and Freddie, he spent years blocking GOP lawmakers from imposing tougher regulations on the mortgage giants. In 1991, the year Moses was hired by Fannie, the Boston Globe reported that Frank pushed the agency to loosen regulations on mortgages for two- and three-family homes, even though they were defaulting at twice and five times the rate of single homes, respectively.

Three years later, President Clinton’s Department of Housing and Urban Development tried to impose a new regulation on Fannie, but was thwarted by Frank. Clinton now blames such Democrats for planting the seeds of today’s economic crisis.

“I think the responsibility that the Democrats have may rest more in resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was president, to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” Clinton said recently.

You know that line from Hamlet, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks?”

When it comes to his insistence that Republicans are to blame for the mortgage meltdown and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the congressman doth protest too much, methinks.