It may be the greatest act of malfeasance ever leveled against the American public and this weekend the NY TIMES is trying to provide cover to its Democratic author(s). Prominent DEMS like Dodd, Frank, Obama, Clinton, Johnson, and Raines are getting a free pass from Old Pinch and his merry band of folk writers.

We just had an election in which the decisive financial melt-down was, as Roger Kimball details today, directly traceable to the Community Reinvestment Act and the Fannie/Freddie implosion — Democrat debacles through and through (with Obama as a top recipient of Fannie and Freddie pay-offs, er, I mean, contributions). Yet the Bush White House evidently figured it was beneath the president to speak out about these facts, and the GOP candidate was either blind to or frozen by the appearance of this hanging curveball, somehow deciding the campaign homestretch was, instead, the perfect time for an ode to, and preening display of, bipartisanship. After all, we wouldn't want to have elections be contests between parties about issues of importance to our lives, right?

And, natch, we got smoked ... and now the people who caused the problem have been put in charge of solving it, which is pretty damn bipartisan if you ask me.

It is a big part of the Left's project to control the historical narrative. If you consistently roll over for them, they will consistently roll over you. I'm delighted to find the White House now, six weeks after the election and eight months after the Bear Stearns fire-sale, telling us all about how Democrats fought off efforts to regulate Fannie and Freddie, about how "Democratic leaders brazenly encouraged Fannie and Freddie to loosen lending standards and instead encouraged the housing GSEs to play a larger and larger role in the housing market — even while explicitly acknowledging the rising risks[,]" etc.

Related
Who caused the global economic crisis? (Hint: it wasn’t George W. Bush)

"Perhaps the most amazing thing about the Times’s little drama that casts George Bush as the protagonist of our economic tragedy is not what’s in it but what isn’t. You will search in vain for the name “Barney Frank” or the phrase “Community Reinvestment Act.” But telling the story of our economic crisis with out those elements is like staging Macbeth without Macbeth or the witches."

Capital Is On Strike

"As Shlaes writes in The Forgotten Man, if Hoover caused the Depression, FDR prolonged it by constantly attacking the investor class, whom he called the “malefactors of great wealth”–a phrase originally said by the first Roosevelt, Theodore. FDR’s attempt to pack the Supreme Court in 1937 was driven in part by his wish to tax the rich retroactively."

(Anti-) Mustard Seeds

"I’m going to get to mustard seeds in a moment, but let me first address two anti-mustard seeds: “bailout nation” and a pump-priming Fed. Bailout nation remains an ongoing issue. It really goes to the issue of government planning, industrial policy, and Uncle Sam picking winners and losers. This obviously includes Detroit, which we will probably get a decision on later this week.

Here’s a quote from President Bush that captures all my concerns about bailout nation: “I’ve abandoned free market principles to save the free market system.” Oh no. Say it ain’t so Mr. Bush. Either you believe in markets, or you don’t. Unfortunately, right now, the intellectual and policy tide out of Washington is anti-market. Not good."

Labels: clintons, democrats, dodd, economics, left-wing media, rangel