FRANK: Few things can match a show like The Five!

TUESDAY, JUNE 2, 2026

Frank said we Blues have some flaws: Yesterday, we started the week's ruminations with a few simple factual questions:  

Were maggots present in the food served to detainees at the Delaney Hall Detention Center?  Did three congressmen actually see some such thing during an inspection last Wednesday? Did Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) actually see some such thing?    

We ask for the obvious reason:

Major news orgs, including the Associated Press, reported that three congressmen said that they'd seen that very thing. For obvious reasons, this report initially created a bit of a stir.

It created a stir for obvious reasons. But, by now, the claim has essentially gone away. It seems that no one actually cares whether some such claim was ever made and if the claim was accurate.   

No one had more fun with this claim that the gang of baboons who swing from the chandeliers on the Fox News Channel's "cable news" program, The Five. 

Yesterday, the panelists in question discussed the various situations at Delaney Hall on that program's third straight broadcast.   The sheer inanity of these presentations help explain why the planet's most famous top experts have begun referring to our struggling nation as, simply put, a "failed state."  

The Five is our nation's most-watched "cable news" show. The fact that its ludicrous journalistic practices have been normalized within the wider political / journalistic culture suggests that our struggling nation is no longer able to function in any sort of serious way.   

Yesterday, we started to show you what the panelists on The Five said about the report of maggots in the food. We expect to report their fuller comments in the next few days.   

The Five is a gruesome artefact of Red American corporate culture. On balance, we know of nothing as gruesome in Blue America as the nonsense which is routinely performed on that program. 

On the other hand:  

The dimwitted conduct on The Five is often tied to legitimate complaints about Democratic Party governance and Blue American political culture. And then, along came the late Barney Frank, age 86, in the final year of his life, writing a book with this possibly puzzling title:

The Hard Path to Unity: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy   

In the headlines which sit above its obituary, the New York Times correctly describes Rep. Frank as someone who was often voted the "brainiest" member of the House of Representatives. 

He was also a liberal stalwart. In her piece for the Times, Katharine Seelye quote Nancy Pelosi giving voice to her view of Frank:

“The quarterback for us is Barney,” Ms. Pelosi told Jeffrey Toobin for a 2009 New Yorker profile of Mr. Frank. “He’s solution-oriented, respectful of different perspectives and brilliant. And it’s brilliance that saves time, because he simplifies the complex for us. He is an enormously valuable intellectual resource for the Congress.”  

He was a "brilliant, enormously valuable intellectual resource." And, no doubt, he was! 

The late Barney Frank was very sharp. He was also extremely witty. But now, Frank has left behind a book saying that we have to "reform the left" if we hope to emerge from our ongoing political and cultural catastrophes—in the parlance of the time, if we hope to "rescue democracy.". 

As a general matter, we agree! In our view, there have been obvious errors within our own Blue America which allowed the sitting president to achieve a second term. 

Those errors have also allowed him to maintain the astoundingly high approval rate he currently enjoys. 

By conventional norms, his approval rate—let's go with something like 38%—is a very poor approval rate. But we'd say it's been our own imperfections which, under the current astonishing circumstances, have kept his approvals that high.   

What kinds of reforms does Frank recommend in the book in question? Because the book hasn't been published yet, there's no perfect way to tell.    

We regard the lunacy of programs like The Five as the ultimate fail in our current journalistic discourse. But how have Blue imperfections of various kinds helped keep the president's approvals that high?

In our view, Rep. Frank was on target in some respects in some of his last few interviews. There may have been a few other examples of imperfect Blue American wisdom which he failed to cite in those sessions.   

Members of tribal groups an find it hard to see their own group's imperfections. Frank was saying that we Blues have some flaws. Could he possibly have gotten that right?

Tomorrow: Back to a normal schedule. One change in format may loom.