“‘Operation Hide Behind The D**kies’, my ass!”

If you’ve been wondering why the Republicans have been yammering about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac being the alleged root of the financial meltdown when they really weren’t, there’s a passage in this McClatchy article (h/t Atrios) that provides a clue:

WASHINGTON — As the economy worsens and Election Day approaches, a conservative campaign that blames the global financial crisis on a government push to make housing more affordable to lower-class Americans has taken off on talk radio and e-mail.

Commentators say that’s what triggered the stock market meltdown and the freeze on credit. They’ve specifically targeted the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which the federal government seized on Sept. 6, contending that lending to poor and minority Americans caused Fannie’s and Freddie’s financial problems.

Ah, but is this true, or is this yet another GOP effort to blame poor brown people for things rich white people did? Signs point to the latter being the case:

Federal housing data reveal that the charges aren’t true, and that the private sector, not the government or government-backed companies, was behind the soaring subprime lending at the core of the crisis.

If the GOP’s bogus arguments sound familiar, it’s because they used the same easily-debunked nonsense to try and blame the current crisis on the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (because it allegedly forced nice upstanding bankers to give money to black people! Quelle horreur!) — even though the vast majority of the bad loans out there had nothing to do with the CRA. In other words, it’s like the "Operation Hide Behind The D**kies" scene in the South Park movie, with the main difference being that it was a lot easier for the maligned black people in the movie to successfully fight back.

The reason the Republicans are dipping into the race-baiting barrel once again isn’t just because it’s their favorite thing to do. It’s because they have to hide their lead role in ripping out all the finance-industry laws that had saved America from stock market meltdowns during the latter half of the last century. Phil Gramm, John McCain’s go-to guy for financial wisdom, is the lead villain of the piece, as he successfully pushed to kill the Glass-Steagall Act that had kept us and our money safe for so many decades. If most Americans understood this — and that Gramm would likely be Treasury Secretary in a hypothetical McCain administration — then not only would McCain go down in flames, so would the GOP’s downticket races, effectively handing firm control of Congress to the Democrats for a generation. So out come the sleazy race-based bogosities on the CRA and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It’s their only hope.

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