Or you could look at it with a slightly different point of view, "Uncle Vanya"-style:

...here comes that Soviet "communal" style of life where you and your comrades work at factories run by the government and eat government-grown potatoes and government-baked bread bought from government-run stores where you stood in long lines to buy rough Soviet toilet paper, and even rougher potato vodka that burns goes down, but numbs the mind just enough, and the government tells you what to do and think and buy and study. You have your good Soviet, politburo joining, card carrying, crazy, banned poetry-spouting, Uncle Barney "communizing" everything he touches. He worse than a socialist. He's a commie. A "neo-com"...

I immediately remembered that Joe Stalin was referred to as "Uncle Joe", not just by FDR, but widely in the press.
Given the most recent "socialist" mud throwing that Palin's been doing, I believe that "Uncle Barney Frank" was an attempt to make the connection of Frank to socialism/communism. Not so effective... it was WAAAAAYY over the heads of the knuckle draggers in the crowd who wouldn't know Stalin if he showed up on the platform next to Palin.

fag bashing. plain and simple

Let's just be clear that Barney Frank understood what was happening in the current financial crisis better than any of the republicans in the Congress and to the benefit of all Americans pushed Paulson to adopt a much more sensible plan. ON policy Frank is right.

The conclusion is that Palin is guaranteeing us that they would follow the Bush administration's practice of putting politics, prejudice and ideological purity before policy. No doubt with the same expected results.

Barney Frank fits in many categories, but most Americans, if they know him, know him as the Democratic face of the government bailout. So we have Barney Frank replacing Uncle Sam as the person responsible for this very unpopular bailout.

Lipstick on a pig is not sexist, but in context suspicious people can see it that way. The same might possibly be true about homophobia and Uncle. I have a gay son and a gay sister (one of those who sued New York State some time ago to advocate for gay marriage), and I have listened to their plaints for decades. I have never heard of Uncle XXX being used to describe a pedophile. That one passed right over my head.

If this smear is so subtle to me, a political junkie, it won't work and, as well, is probably not a smear.

This despicable bitch...I disagree that this is primarily to refer to Uncle Sam. She's so fucking ignorant, she wouldn't know the first goddam thing about gays, and lacks utterly the capacity to put their issues in context. She just swallows whole the regurgitation that's placed in her mouth. Fuck her.

Palin says she doesn't want government making decisions for us and that she and McCain "tend to want to trust the American people with their income, their businesses, their things." What she neglects to mention, however, is that she and McCain don't trust the American people with decisions about their wombs or their choice of marriage partners.