Finally, SOMEONE In Media Takes A Democrat To Task For Finance Meltdown

I couldn’t agree more with the words of Noel Sheppard:

Finally, someone in the media accurately accused and challenged a member of Congress over his involvement and complicity in the current financial crisis.

As press member after press member has allowed Democrats to shamefully and erroneously blame the current crisis on George W. Bush, virtually nobody other than folks at Fox News has been willing to examine the role elected officials on the left side of the aisle have been playing for more than a decade in blocking tighter regulation on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

There is an unprecedented and frankly astonishing degree of spin and outright deception going on in the mainstream media today.  And in this climate we are about to hold the most important election most of us have faced in our lifetimes.

A blatantly biased media routinely allow their air time to be taken up by Democrat after Democrat blaming the disaster on “the failed policies of this [Bush] administration,” and “8 years of deregulation by Republicans”, without presenting any analysis questioning whether those claims are true.  The reality is that Democrats’ fingerprints are all over the financial meltdown.  And I have written a bunch of articles trying to put the truth to light:

How ‘Failed Policies’ Of Democrats Were Responsible For Financial Crisis

Why Barney Frank Can Stick His ‘Republicans With Hurt Feelings’ Remark

Supreme Court LIBERALS Blocked States From Regulating Financial System

Democrats Refused To Regulate GSEs, Created Financial Tsunami

Democrats’ Idea Of Bipartisanship Is HARD CORE Partisanship

Dems Blame Bush For Deregulation: Just Another Day Of Astounding Liberal Hypocrisy

Financial Crisis: Obama Democrats Have Red Ink All Over Them

Obama V.P. Pick Joe Biden Shares Direct Blame For Foreclosure Disaster

Obama’s National Finance Chair Pritzker At Epicenter of Sub Prime Crisis

Democrats, The Countrywide Scandal, and Self-Righteous Hypocrisy

Even when Bill Clinton blames Democrats for their refusal to regulate the finance industry against Republican attempts to do so, the media refuses to look at the role of Democrats:

Bill Clinton on Thursday told ABC’s Chris Cuomo that Democrats for years have been “resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was President to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.”

So when a Bill O’Reilly has a Barney Frank on his program, and even raises the questions about the Democrats’ role in the crisis, it deserves attention.

BILL O’REILLY, HOST: “Personal story” segment tonight, the financial chaos in this country is largely the fault of the citizens who cannot pay their obligations, banks who lent money to unqualified people, and the federal government which failed to provide oversight. Both political parties are to blame as I’ve stated.

Now “The Factor” has called on SEC Chairman Christopher Cox to resign, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd to quit, and House Finance Chief Barney Frank to step down from his position. That’s because for the past two years, Frank and his committee oversaw Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — two government sponsored lending agencies which pretty much are bankrupt.

Congressman Frank was asked about Freddie and Fannie on July 14, 2008:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. BARNEY FRANK, D-MASS.: I think this is a case where Fannie and Freddie are fundamentally sound, that they are not in danger of going under. They’re not the best investments these days from the long-term standpoint going back. I think they are in good shape going forward.

They’re in a housing market. I do think their prospects going forward are very solid. And in fact, we’re going to do some things that are going to improve them.
(END VIDEO CLIP)

O’REILLY: Well, obviously, that statement turned out not to be true.

O’Reilly pointed out that – during the last two years of Barney Franks chairmanship over the House Financial Services Committee and Democratic control, “Look, bottom line is you’re there two years. Bottom line is stock drops 90 percent.”

Now, if you’ve heard a single Democrat blame bush and the Republicans for the finance meltdown, but you don’t know that Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s stock crashed 90% during the Democrats’ tenure, and that even three months ago the Democratic leadership was assuring us that everything was fine, you’ve been cheated by the media.  You have literally been lied to.

People were saying, ‘How far down can the stock go?  Are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac solvent?’  And Barney Frank said, “Fannie and Freddie are fundamentally sound, that they are not in danger of going under. They’re not the best investments these days from the long-term standpoint going back. I think they are in good shape going forward.”  And so people kept buying stock, and kept business as usual, and the whole thing came crashing down.

People at Enron went to prison for doing precisely the same thing that Barney Frank did.

Barney Frank, in his feeble defense that initiated a shouting match, said:

FRANK: No. You’ve misrepresented this consistently. I became chairman of the committee on January 31st, 2007. Less than two months later, I did what the Republicans hadn’t been able to do in 12 years — get through the committee a very tough regulatory bill. And it passed the House in May.

I’ve always felt two things about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that they had an important role to play, but that the regulations should be improved.

Now from 1995 to 2006, when the Republicans controlled Congress and we were in the minority, we couldn’t get that done. Although in 2005, Mike Oxley, of Sarbanes-Oxley fame, a pretty tough guy on regulation, did try to put a bill through to regulate Fannie Mae. I worked with him on it. As he told The Financial Times, he thought ideological rigidity in the Bush administration stopped that.

But the basic point is that the first time I had any real authority over this was January of 2007. And within two months, we had passed the bill that regulated.

Well, the facts are that Democrats DID succeed in passing a regulatory bill where the Republicans had failed.  But why did the Republicans fail?  They had failed in 2003, and then again in 2005, because Democrats were in lock step against it in the committees, and because the Democrats in the Senate threatened a filibuster that the Republicans wouldn’t be able to overcome.

It’s like children who refused to play with the other children until they got to make all the rules taking credit for the game, and conveniently forgetting that they hadn’t been willing to play before.

Barney Frank has been claiming that there was nothing wrong with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac going back at least five years, as a September 11, 2003 New York Times article proves:

”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

So whey do the Democrats who utterly failed to see the disaster coming and who prevented the Republicans from regulating at least twice when such regulation would have prevented this crisis get to blame the Republicans for failing to realize that the disaster was coming and for refusing to regulate?  Because, by and large, the media won’t tell you the truth and consistenly lets Democrats get away with murder.

Tags: 90%, Barney Frank, bias, Bill Clinton, Bill O'Reilly, Bush, deception, Democrats, economic, Fannie Mae, financial crisis, Freddie Mac, good shape, GSEs, interview, Media, Republicans, shouting match, spin, stock