Posted on 01/08/2009 11:44:40 AM PST by GOP_Lady
Democrats and the media have the housing story wrong.
Mythmaking is in full swing as the Bush administration prepares to leave town. Among the more prominent is the assertion that the housing meltdown resulted from unbridled capitalism under a president opposed to all regulation.
It took Fannie and Freddie over three decades to acquire $2 trillion in mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. Together, they held $2.1 trillion in 2000. By 2005, the two GSEs held $4 trillion, up 92% in just five years. By 2008, they'd grown another 24%, to nearly $5 trillion. They held almost half of all American mortgages.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
A very informative article by Karl Rove. MUST READ!
You know the lib/dems don’t have a good/convincing story to tell or you know they’d be all over this like they were with HealthSouth/WorldCom/Enron.
Gotta hand that one to GWB. That’s one thing he did right; if it weren’t for the sorry sodomite on the banking committee we might not be in financial Gomorrah right now.
A little too late...the White House lost the PR war. The Democrats and the media tagged this financial crisis around Bush and the Republicans neck for all eternity. Bush’s WH was utterly incompetent in the PR game for both Iraq and the economy. When I try to explain to people the truth about Fannie/Freddie, their eyes just glaze over.
4later
No truer words!
Too little, too late. Woulda, coulda, shoulda at this point, Karlos La Raza. GWB mostly squandered or didn’t use his bully pulpit.
They need it in a 15 second sound bite.
Its pretty clear after that infamous prime time press conference, when five or more reporters asked the President’ did you make any mistakes’ (obviously not happy with his first five answers) that President Bush decided ‘to hell with it’ and just stopped fighting the MSM leftwingnut slant of the news.
I can understand that...but it cost this nation dearly, not to mention the Republican Party losing both the House and Senate, and now the Whitehouse.
The President did a magnificent job fighting the war with the jihadists after 9/11.
But his decisions on domestic policy have been disasterous, and his failure to ‘see the fight through’ on Fanny and Freddy is going to cost this nation for decades to come.
Wasn’t his fault, but his choice in January of 2005 where to ‘spend my political capital’ was the beginning of the GOP implosion nationally for the time being.
JMHO.
How true. I really wish the Bush administration had fought harder to get the truth out. Might have swayed the election.
ROVE YOU MAGNIFICENT BASTARD!
I'll read Turdblossum's screed later. Dubya was able to bring down Saddam, but he never fought the Democrats with the same passion and sense of purpose. He acted as if every Democrat on the Hill were Bob Bullock Democrats, and it turned out to be fatal to his administration.
There's plenty of blame to go around...I'm not putting all this on President Bush. However, he most certainly squandered the power of his bully pulpit.
Please explain how that is "trying to rein in"...?
re: the White House lost the PR war
Did they ever really FIGHT in that war? And I don’t mean that as an insult to them or to question the outcome of the war. I wonder if there was ever ANYTHING they could have done to win that war? Sometimes it’s more prudent to not get into a fight, and especially a war, when you simply can’t win. Getting into a battle you can’t win is suicide.
Please don’t get me wrong. I am not being an apologist for the horrible way the administration conducted their side of the PR war. OTOH, I have to wonder if there was any winning that war knowing how deep the BDS runs and how absolutely psychotic the MSM became as time went on.
He seemed to be holding his own for a while, but at some point the tide turned and from then on it was downhill for him and his efforts. Was it when he came to town and made the mistake of thinking he could work with the opposition? Did the other side know at that moment they could win the war?
Whatever the reason and timing I can honestly say I’ve never seen an administration fail so miserably or so completely in the PR world. Breathtaking.
bump
Incorrect. Everything is Bush's fault. If not Bush's fault, then it is the American people destroying the world so it the American peoples fault. The nation is divided today was it was during the Bush term but since a dem is in office, the minority that had to be protected will never be listened to.
Where was Bush in all those previous years publicly TALKING about this?????
It was Jimmy Carter who started us down the path to this mess (Community Re-Investment Act) and since then it has been a continuing agenda by the democratic party to intertwine their political agenda with the free market. The housing market was not a Truly free market. It was the democrats who created these GSE’s in the first place. The democrats along with activist groups like ACORN had manipulated the market into real bad lending practices. It was President Bush in 2003 who strongly pushed to regulate and reform this problem but it was strongly blocked by the democratic party.
Just the Facts: The Administration’s Unheeded Warnings About the Systemic Risk Posed by the GSEs
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/09/20080919-15.html
There are videos on YouTube showing the democrats arguing against reform of the GSE’s and video of the GSE’s calling the Congressional Black Caucus it’s family even. Not to mention that Obama is also the number two recipient of money from these GSE’s.
One of the major differences between the democratic and republican party ideologies is that the republicans believe in keeping the market as free from politics as possible whereas the democratic party believes in a market that is intertwined with politics. This is the result in this case. It was the democratic party agenda in the market place that caused this problem.
Freddie Mac’s mortgage portfolio was only $500 million when I left in 2003.
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