TheLoop21.com

By: Michael E. Ross (Add to your loop)
Mon, 10/13/2008 - 00:05

Guess what, folks? It's time to play Whack-a-Minority.

As the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain has steadily declined and the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression has overtaken America, the conservative movement — its thought leaders and others — have built a new boogeyman.

They're sending a message meant to both validate the aspirations of the McCain campaign and find a believable cause for the now-global financial crisis.

Guess what, folks? It's time to play Whack-a-Minority.

♦♦♦

Sept. 18 was apparently Pile-on Day in this game. That was when Lawrence Kudlow, CNBC host and former Reagan financial adviser, appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe talk show and blamed the crisis on low-income homeowners, disproportionately black and minority. Here's what he said: "(Members of Congress') ... liberal guilty consciences forced banks and lenders to make lousy sub-standard loans, and that has to be repealed. Not everybody can afford a home, Joe. Some people have to rent."
 
[video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI1H1Eg4GJU]

Even Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough, a reliable conservative, ripped into Kudlow.

The same day, Fox Business Channel's Neil Cavuto said it plainer than that. In a discussion with a California congressman about the Treasury Department's decision to place housing agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into conservatorship, Cavuto tried to point the finger of blame.
 
"When you and many of your colleagues were pushing for more minority lending and more expanded lending to foloks who heretofore couldn't get mortgages, when you were pushing home ownership ... Are you totally blameless?," Cavuto asked Rep. Xavier Becerra. "I'm just saying, I don't remember a clarion call that said: Fannie and Freddie are a disaster. Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster."

Notice Cavuto's ham-fisted conflation of "minorities" and "risky folks."

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer jumped in the game a week later, writing in the Sept. 26 Post that "much of this crisis was brought upon us by the good intentions of good people. … For decades, starting with Jimmy Carter's Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, there has been bipartisan agreement to use government power to expand homeownership to people who had been shut out for economic reasons or, sometimes, because of racial and ethnic discrimination. What could be a more worthy cause? But it led to tremendous pressure on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — which in turn pressured banks and other lenders — to extend mortgages to people who were borrowing over their heads. That's called subprime lending. It lies at the root of our current calamity."

And on Oct.7, McCain, speaking at the second presidential debate, indirectly blamed low-income homeowners for getting loans they couldn't afford. Trotting out the whipping boys Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, McCain said "they're the ones that with the encouragement of Senator Obama, and his cronies and his friends in Washington that went out and made all these risky loans, gave them to peole who could never afford to pay them back."
 
The same night, McCain, who by his own admission doesn't know much about economics, had the nerve to speak condescendingly to Oliver Clark, an African American who asked him a question about the mortgage mess.