First, I am supposed to "forget" we didn't go to Iraq to remove nasty old Saddam, but instead to defend ourselves from those weapons of mass destruction he was prepared to use on us at any second. The ones that never surfaced. But we removed a "bad man," right?
Now, I'm supposed to buy the argument that Boogeyman Bill Clinton forced economic ruin upon us by forcing lending institutions to pour money into poor neighborhoods using that all-powerful club, the Community Reinvestment Act. Oh, the melodrama! The banking/lending industry, clutching their lacy hankies to their chests and crying, "Please... please Mr. CRA officer! Don't make us lend money to those poverty-stricken people! We know they don't have the money, and our big ol' hearts just can't bear the thought of them losing their homes someday!"
"Too bad!" evilly laughs the mustachioed villain. "You must! I have the power of the CRA behind me! And that reminds me..." He swirls around, his black cape swirling about him in a flourish. "I don't see a copy of it displayed in your lobby! You'll pay for that!" Banking industry wails, swoons, and faints.
Come on.
As if that scenario weren't preposterous enough (banks major complaint about CRA had always been the paperwork involved. They never lobbied against it as "forcing" them to lend to anybody), these liars expect me to forget about all the changes to the credit/banking industry that passed at the end of Clinton's era through, well, 2007 when Congress finally "noticed." That's right, somehow these corporations managed to push through every last "reform" to their favor, yet were magically hamstrung by the dastardly CRA?
And what "proof" of this scenario do we have? An editorial by some schmuck at Investor's Business Daily? He makes a lot of assertions without concrete examples to back them up.
I found this somewhat enlightening.
In light of Republican strategists claiming Clinton caused this mess because he wanted to force everyone to own a home, I found this quite enlightening as well.
