The Right Wing's Account of the Financial Crisis Has Been Destroyed

As the worldwide financial crisis blossomed in September of 2008, I was stunned by the speed at which the right wing media was able to create a simple narrative that explained what had happened and who was to blame. While Democrats and mainstream media figures continued to mumble about ARMs and CDOs, every right winger in the country knew by October that the culprit was the newly minted financial conglomerate FFF&D(Fannie, Freddie, Frank, and Dodd).

Boiled down to a single sentence, here is the right wing's account of the crisis:

Senator Chris Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, with the help of ACORN thugs, forced numerous financial institutions to purchase millions of bundled subprime junk mortgages from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and convinced all the credit rating agencies that these securities were free of risk, thereby injecting a time bomb of fraudulent financial instruments into the world economy that exploded when high gas prices caused large numbers of mortgage defaults.

To see how quickly this narrative took hold, watch this John McCain campaign ad from late September 2008. This has been the story put forth by Fox News and right wing talk radio from the very beginning of the crisis up to this day, despite numerous debunkings. Most recently, House Speaker John Boehner was caught parroting the zombie talking point.

It's time to cut this zombie's head off and drive a stake through its heart. The tools we need to do this have been available for months. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission released its reports in January explaining the causes of the financial meltdown. In the commission's primary report and one of two dissenting reports, it was explained that numerous factors were to blame for the financial crisis.

Only the conclusions of a single member of the ten-person bipartisan commission, Peter Wallison, support this right wing fairy tale. Wallison, John Boehner's pick for the commission, released the second dissenting report, in which he claims subprime and non-traditional mortages are entirely to blame for the crisis.

The three other Republican members of the commission, all with strong conservative bonafides, identified ten major causes of the crisis. They rejected the right wing narrative as a far too simplistic an explanation for what occured.

It should be stated forcefully and often by Democrats, liberals, and anyone with an interest in the truth, that the FFF&D theory about the financial crisis is a far-right fringe notion even among conservatives. The results of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission prove it.

...study front-and-center when framing our position. Thanks for all the post and especially all the links.

He actually writes that "No significant deregulation of financial institutions occured in the last 30 years".

there is a lot of good information in the reports, slow but worthwhile reading for those who seek to understand the makings of this crisis.

You make excellent points but the 'publicons will continue to beat the Dodd Frank drum. Our side needs this information to be able to continuously counter that drum beat.

and the r

Unless they support the right-wing position, they're just a ploy by the LIBURL MEEDEA to BRAENWARSH AMARIKA! Or something.

I hope democrats take this ammunition and give the R's both barrels with it. Seriously.