IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
RIGHT WINGERS BLAME THE POOR FOR LOUSY ECONOMY
The letters page of The Fresno Bee is a good barometer of right-wing talking points. In the past few days a couple of letters about the current economic crisis caught my attention. The letters made the astounding claim that George W. Bush wanted to regulate Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae back about 2003, that Congressional Democrats resisted, and that the problems at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae brought on our housing crisis and the rotten economy.
So, here we have right-wingers, who normally foam at the mouth about government regulations, suddenly embracing regulations.
But this goes even further. It claims that the problems at Freddie and Fannie are the main reason for the housing crisis, which isn't valid. It also puts the blame on poor and minority people getting affordable loans. The right-wingers claim that these loans were essentially forced on the banks and the loans went bad. So, there you have it: Bush's policies and the right-wingers free market ideas aren't responsible at all. It's just coincidence that we have rotten economies every time Republicans are in power. It's just coincidence that the GOP's fat cat friends always do well and that taxpayers, including those reprobate poor and minority people, wind up bailing them out. This commentary by Sara Robinson is at www.alternet.org:
Conservative pundits and politicians have piled onto the excuse like shipwreck victims clinging to a passing log: The real blame for the current economic crisis, conservatives would have you believe, lies not with anything they did, but rather with the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act -- a successful Carter-era program designed to get banks to stop covert discrimination, and encourage them to invest their money in low-income neighborhoods.
It's always easy to tell when the cons are completely lost at sea. The lies get more absurdly preposterous -- and also more transparently self-serving. But when they go so far as to openly and unapologetically latch onto race and class as an excuse for their woes (which this is, at its heart), you know they're taking on water fast -- and scared of going under entirely.
You can hear the conservative commentators burbling this CRA fable from the Wall Street Journal to the National Review; from Rush to YouTube. Neil Cavuto put the essence of the argument right out there on Fox News: "Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster." See! It's all the liberals' fault for insisting on social justice!
