Noooo, sir. It was Bush's fault! You speak blasphemy! Out demon!
Lots of blame to go around, like with almost all of government's big time mistakes. Clinton and Bush. Congressional republicans and democrat with shifting leaderships in the senate and eventually the house too. Clinton, pushed by congressional republicans and seemingly happily abetted by congressional dems given the vote tallies, put in place a number bad policy changes, extending too far some of the otherwise wise deregulatory policies of Reagan. Bush pushed hard, in an act of bipartisan/compassionate-conservative idiocy, to get lenders (including particularly the two GSO's of Fannie and Freddie) to reduce their standards even more (started long ago under Carter and expanded under Clinton, before Bush) for lending gobs of money to people that either shouldn't rightly have qualified or were buying way beyond their means. Such efforts were long the pet projects of congressional democrats, perhaps most notably Mr. Barney Frank. And of course the GSOs were practically an agency of the DNC, their leadership and managerial staff consisting of primarily democrats of administrations past (and now present) as well as out of work dem senators and congresspersons.
At any rate, we now see our DC leaders running us headlong into another set of big time mistakes. Frank is, of course, back to his old game of loosening lending regulations (news of this within the last week). Cap-n-tax, Health Care reform (stalking horse universal single payor is the game, make no mistake about it), giant stimulus that is barely being spent (yet is a giant red mark on the budget and weighing down the economy through international perception of the currency), TARP and the aftermath of government coercsion of management and foot-in-the-door pseudo-regulatory bullying, GM and Chrystler bailouts and majority ownership stakes and all the same foot-in-the-door bullying being brought to bear there... and we are just getting started in this administration and congress.
