Recently, the people at the Dakota War College parroted this opinion piece and tried to sell it as a great example that President Bush saw this crisis coming and it is obviously the Democrats who were to blame for the current state of the market.

As with the idea that the Surge is Working!, this is just another example of an oft-repeated and distorted lie can be accepted as truth if the pundits are loud enough and if the electorate and media is lazy enough.

This is S. 190, the bill that purportedly shows that the Bush administration was aware of the problem before the Crisis hit full scale. I challenge each and every reader and dispenser of this myth to look through this bill and help me find where it creates more regulations or more oversight for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Here's a short hint - it doesn't. As in, not at all.

What S.190 did do was to transfer the oversight that is normally done by the Committee for Housing and Urban development to private corporations all in the interest of Market Forces. This was not regulation of a giant, this was further deregulation by creating more loops for oversight committees to jump through. At its best, it was rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic as this piece of legislation DID NOT in any way or form create any more additional avenues of oversight. In fact, the bill itself talks about how the problems are the government oversight committees, which makes it DEREGULATORY.

As I said numerous times before, the cause of this mess is the complex system of neither regulation nor deregulation that was caused by the policies of the late 1990s. S. 190 is just another attempt to continue those misguided policies authored by Phil Gramm, supported by John McCain and enabled by Bill Clinton. The blame for this mess is squarely on the shoulders of this butchering of our banking system. In the interest of corporate interests, we allowed banks to mingle with investment companies and other unstable Wall Street elements and now the shortsighted policies of the 90s are coming back to haunt us.

Never mind that this crisis goes way beyond Fannie and Freddie and that even those who recognized the instability of the Housing Market often failed to forsee such a huge downturn in both the Credit and Investment banking markets, the fact that people will allow the pundits and politicians to get away with such distortions of the truth is disturbing. Quit finding excuses and targets and start doing more research folks, the claim circulated by Republicans and spread by partisans and pundits is a lie. They didn't see this coming, and that's an indictment on our current leadership.

Also, the claim that PACs recieve a lot of money from Fannie and Freddie investors is a really dumb one. A lot of people recieve money from these groups on both sides of the isle. The fact that you recieve less money doesn't mean you're not in their pockets, it mostly just means that you didn't happen to hold a valuable Senate Committee chairs at the time. I know it's horrible and disgusting, but that's how it works.

More disgustingly, people seem to have little idea how PACs work. PACs (political action committees) are how Fannie and Freddie (the corporate entities) make their donations. This campaign PACs made up 1% of Senator McCain's campagin warchest (a total of about 1.3 million). They have given a total of $450 to Senator Obama. These contributions are tiny in comparison to the money involved in campaigns, to suggest high PAC contributions are somehow equivalent to "being in bed" with someone is not only misleading, it is downright alarmist and ignorant.

I can come up here and point out that Senator McCain gets more contributions to his presidential campaign from Fannie and Freddie lobbyists, workers and executives (which counts as private donations) than Senator Obama and that his huge advantage in PAC donations means that he is a corporate tool, but that'd be short-sighted and intentionally distortionist. John McCain is a corporate tool because of his long history of corporate deregulation, not because of the composition of his Warchest.

(BTW, that study cited is misleading in a big way. It's rather easy to give Obama the edge when you count employees and not the corporate chairpeople, as that study does. Ask yourself, folks, who is more likely to be pushing corporate interests - the Employees (who gives to Obama) or the company chairpeople (who gives to McCain)*

*Or it could be just people voting and donating in accordance with their economic interests, which would certainly be an acceptable and very logical argument. I don't know the answer, but this whole conversation is dumb and alarmist, so let's stop.