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President Clinton is plugging a new book scolding Wall Street and Republicans and offering his "solutions" to an economic mess he helped cause. His gall knows no bounds.
The media portray Clinton, who acts as if he were still president, as some kind of hero riding in to save the economy. But it was his own policies that wrecked it.
And now he's covering up his fault by blaming others, when in fact he forced banks to make high-risk loans in the name of diversity.
"When President George W. Bush took office, it was the first time anti-government Republicans had held both houses of Congress and the White House. They could do whatever they wanted," Clinton intones in "Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy." "It soon became clear they wanted less regulatory oversight" of the financial sector.
In fact, the problem was too much regulation, not too little.
Starting in the 1990s, banks came under siege by regulators who politicized their mortgage-underwriting decisions on Clinton's orders.
He added teeth to anti-redlining laws under the Community Reinvestment Act, and made it nearly impossible for banks to expand if they didn't pass CRA lending tests.
Then he ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy and bundle the riskier mortgages into securities to meet the higher "affordable-housing" lending quotas he slapped on the publicly created mortgage giants.
