Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Megan McArdle on Laying Blame for the Banking Crisis

It's late so a quick link to Instapundit and a few quote will have to suffice. But Megan McArdle is on a tear an deserves to be noted for it. She is taking both sides of the aisle to task for trying to blame for the current economic crisis on the other. First up the Democrats:
There are a whole lot of Democrats in the comments to this post who know that Bush could have and should have stopped this bubble. They don't know what he could have done, exactly; they're not tricksy bankers. But they've read, like, one and a half whole articles on the subject, so they're sure that this is the fault of Republican ideology.

I'm so glad that I'm voting with the reality based community this time around.

I interrupt this post to note that thanks to Bill Clinton, millions of people have died of cancer in the last ten years. It seems to me that if he cared, he could have funded research that would have cured cancer. What research? I don't know, I'm not a damn doctor. All I know is, a lot of people are dying of cancer.
I don't know how you could say it better. The Republicans aren't spared, either:
Meanwhile, I'm seeing commenters claim that the housing crisis is really all about the Democrats making lenders lend money to poor people.

The data doesn't track you. The legislative pushes to expand lending to the poor do not match very well the subprime crisis, either in time or scope. Probably they contributed somewhat, but at best only slightly.

It would be nice if everything that went wrong in the world was a result of the scheming of our ideological opponents. But the sad fact is, stuff goes wrong. All the time. And there is usually no villain behind it.
That last sentence rings true. During a political campaign, everything has to be blamed on somebody. The blame game quickly becomes tiresome.

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