But he's far from alone. McCarthyite frenzies (we're enduring a particular instance of the phenomenon) succeed because politicians figure out (or, more often, stumble onto) little slogans that capture the imagination of The People for a while. That's BIC now.
BIC is the functional political equivalent of "My country, right or wrong", "America: Love it or leave it", "Better dead than red", "Remember the Maine", "54-40 or fight" ... the list goes on and on. Raw democracy can be a horrible thing -- Arthur Miller portrayed it well in The Crucible. Once it gets going, it's a fierce creature to tame. Our nation's Founders did the best they could by including a Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution. John Marshall tossed in some help when he discovered judicial review.
It's frenzies such as we're enduring that make me not sanguine about a legislative solution (at least not in the People's Republic of Texas, lemme tell you!) but look to the judiciary, instead. Rational debate has a chance there in the worst of times. Remember, it was the judiciary -- far more than the U.S. Congress, and even more than MLK -- that made the Civil Rights era in the United States. Without the judiciary, I don't know how an honest person could doubt that we'd still be dealing with "the nigras our way down heh, boy".
I believe it's going to take similar intellectual integrity and moral backbone from the judiciary to solve our problem. Once guys like Frank get a hold of a slogan like BIC, we see it's impossible for rational discussion to prevail. We dangerous and despised minorities ;-) need our liberties protected most of all from our well-meaning but dim fellow citizens who are following contemporary McCarthys just as surely as their parents followed the original.