Still in vassalage to Bush, Powerline shreds its credibility

I normally think of Paul of Powerline as a reasonably honest writer. But today he wrote something that makes him look like a pure partisan hack:

Last decade, liberal Democrats decided to impose a system that encouraged and enabled home ownership by people who could not afford to buy homes. This decision played a major role in nearly wrecking the banking system and in throwing the economy into a deep recession.

Now, even as the economy labors to overcome the effects of that recession, the same crowd is about to strike again.

Paul would have his readers believe that only the Democrats were behind the disastrous expansion of home mortgages aimed at spreading home ownership to more blacks and Hispanics. He would have his readers believe that the great George W. Bush and lots of Republicans had nothing to do with it, which, of course, is not true, as I pointed out in 2008:

George W. Bush: the master spirit of subprime mortgages

Correcting Ann Coulter’s article that lays the whole situation at the feet of the Democrats, a reader sends a speech by President Bush in 2002 in which he lauded the efforts to expand home ownership among blacks and Hispanics by knocking down “barriers” to minority home ownership. These “barriers,” of course, were simply the standard measures of creditworthiness that had always been operative in this country, prior to the metastasis of the left-liberal ideology, fully shared by Busherino himself, which says that any absence of equality of outcome among different racial groups is due to racial discrimination, rather than to inherent racial or cultural differences.

The Compassionate One spake:

More and more people own their homes in America today. Two-thirds of all Americans own their homes, yet we have a problem here in America because few than half of the Hispanics and half the African Americans own the home. That’s a homeownership gap. It’s a—it’s a gap that we’ve got to work together to close for the good of our country, for the sake of a more hopeful future. We’ve got to work to knock down the barriers that have created a homeownership gap.

So, in a fantastic irony that could only happen in late liberal society, liberals are attacking Bush’s supposed patronage of his greedy capitalist pals as the cause of the disaster, when in reality Bush was fully onboard the racial egalitarian project that was the true cause of the disaster, or at least its principal cause. But Bush’s establishment conservative allies can’t defend him from that false charge. What are they going to say? “It’s not true that Bush caused this disaster by helping his greedy rich friends. He caused it by pushing his rich greedy friends to abandon proper credit standards in order to give mortgages to improvident blacks and Hispanics who were unable to pay them off, all for the purpose of creating racial equality of outcome in America”? They can’t say this, because their entire empire is built on the conceit that Bush is a conservative.

[end of 2008 entry]

I might have added to the last sentence: just as the left’s entire empire is also built on the conceit that Bush is a conservative.

- end of initial entry -

October 10

Natassia writes:

Contrary to Karl Rove’s assertions in a 2009 Wall Street Journal article that the subprime mortgage market was a big concern of George W. Bush, in 2003 (when Republicans were in control of Congress) President Bush signed into law the American Dream Downpayment Initiative.

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the purpose of the ADDI was to:

increase the homeownership rate, especially among lower income and minority households, and to revitalize and stabilize communities. ADDI will help first-time homebuyers with the biggest hurdle to homeownership: downpayment and closing costs. The program was created to assist low-income first-time homebuyers in purchasing single-family homes by providing funds for downpayment, closing costs, and rehabilitation carried out in conjunction with the assisted home purchase.

Rove insisted that Bush didn’t really want to encourage people to buy homes they couldn’t afford but rather to encourage the purchase of homes that they could afford. Well, if you can’t afford a decent downpayment and you have a low income, perhaps you shouldn’t be buying a home at all but instead rent one.

LA writes:

I would urge readers to write to Powerline and nail them for their partisan lying on this issue. They like to think of themselves as honest. Confronted by the evidence of Paul’s gross cover-up for Bush and the Republicans on this issue, relating to well-known facts, what will they say? That they didn’t know that Bush actively lobbied for the expansion of mortgages to nonwhites who couldn’t afford them?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 09, 2010 06:35 PM | Send