Lamest defense ever!!!

    The current financial disaster has come on over the past eight years, there really isn’t much debate on that. Another fact is that half of that time Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the White House. So, if you’re a Republican running for office in 2008, how do you deal with these facts?

     Dig up the Bill Clinton Scarecrow and hope it will convince some people that as always, he is the boogeyman responsible for every problem in this country. I get that. It’s politics pure and simple.

    What bothers me is the way they placed the blame on Clinton and how some people are ACTUALLY buying into it. Take this quote from Investor’s Business Daily:

 

    “it was the Clinton administration, obsessed with multiculturalism, that dictated where mortgage lenders could lend, and originally helped create the market for the high-risk subprime loans now infecting like a retrovirus the balance sheets of many of Wall Street’s most revered institutions.

Tough new regulations forced lenders into high-risk areas where they had no choice but to lower lending standards to make the loans that sound business practices had previously guarded against making. It was either that or face stiff government penalties.

The untold story in this whole national crisis is that President Clinton put on steroids the Community Reinvestment Act*, a well-intended Carter-era law designed to encourage minority homeownership. And in so doing, he helped create the market for the risky subprime loans that he and Democrats now decry as not only greedy but “predatory.””

 

   Is this true? Maybe in part. Does the blame then fall upon the shoulders the Boogey Bill? Well, as long as you forget that over the past eight years this directive could have been changed. There is absolutely no way you can bring up this defense of Republicans without having to answer the simple question: if it’s such a horrible plan, why didn’t you change it when you could have?

    I have yet to hear an answer to that one.

   Could we maybe deal with a treasury department that was too interested in making sure the economy “looked good.” They spent a great deal of time and effort trying to prop up the economy and the stock market. Of course we’ve had to recover from 9/11 in this time period, but that isn’t a blank check to justify what they’ve done.

    Can we face the simple fact that when money is involved, if you dial regulation way back, shenagins are bound to happen. I don’t want the government to tell me what to do all of the time, but when it comes to the manipulation of the stock market, lies on the books of public companies, rampant lending to people who couldn’t pay off those loans…we could use a little help from our government.

   Sorry Republican apologists, I don’t think ALL of this is the fault of your party, but the effort to blame Clinton is pathetic at best.

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