They Gave Your Mortgage to a Less Qualified Minority
By: Ann Coulter
FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, September 26, 2008
On MSNBC this week, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter tried to connect John
McCain to the current financial disaster, saying: "If you remember the
Keating Five scandal that (McCain) was a part of. ... He's really
getting a free ride on the fact that he was in the middle of the last
great financial scandal in our country."
McCain was "in the
middle of" the Keating Five case in the sense that he was "exonerated."
The lawyer for the Senate Ethics Committee wanted McCain removed from
the investigation altogether, but, as The New York Times reported:
"Sen. McCain was the only Republican embroiled in the affair, and
Democrats on the panel would not release him."
So John McCain has been held hostage by both the Viet Cong and the Democrats.
Alter couldn't be expected to know that: As usual, he was lifting
material directly from Kausfiles. What is unusual was that he was
stealing a random thought sent in by Kausfiles' mother, who, the day
before, had e-mailed: "It's time to bring up the Keating Five. Let
McCain explain that scandal away."
The Senate Ethics Committee
lawyer who investigated McCain already had explained that scandal away
-- repeatedly. It was celebrated lawyer Robert Bennett, most famous for
defending a certain horny hick president a few years ago.
In February this year, on Fox News' "Hannity and Colmes," Bennett said, for the eight billionth time:
"First,
I should tell your listeners I'm a registered Democrat, so I'm not on
(McCain's) side of a lot of issues. But I investigated John McCain for
a year and a half, at least, when I was special counsel to the Senate
Ethics Committee in the Keating Five. ... And if there is one thing I
am absolutely confident of, it is John McCain is an honest man. I
recommended to the Senate Ethics Committee that he be cut out of the
case, that there was no evidence against him."
It's bad enough
for Alter to be constantly ripping off Kausfiles. Now he's so devoid of
his own ideas, he's ripping off the idle musings of Kausfiles' mother.
Even
if McCain had been implicated in the Keating Five scandal -- and he
wasn't -- that would still have absolutely nothing to do with the
subprime mortgage crisis currently roiling the financial markets. This
crisis was caused by political correctness being forced on the mortgage
lending industry in the Clinton era.
Before the Democrats'
affirmative action lending policies became an embarrassment, the Los
Angeles Times reported that, starting in 1992, a majority-Democratic
Congress "mandated that Fannie and Freddie increase their purchases of
mortgages for low-income and medium-income borrowers. Operating under
that requirement, Fannie Mae, in particular, has been aggressive and
creative in stimulating minority gains."
Under Clinton, the
entire federal government put massive pressure on banks to grant more
mortgages to the poor and minorities. Clinton's secretary of Housing
and Urban Development, Andrew Cuomo, investigated Fannie Mae for racial
discrimination and proposed that 50 percent of Fannie Mae's and Freddie
Mac's portfolio be made up of loans to low- to moderate-income
borrowers by the year 2001.
Instead of looking at "outdated
criteria," such as the mortgage applicant's credit history and ability
to make a down payment, banks were encouraged to consider
nontraditional measures of credit-worthiness, such as having a good
jump shot or having a missing child named "Caylee."
Threatening
lawsuits, Clinton's Federal Reserve demanded that banks treat welfare
payments and unemployment benefits as valid income sources to qualify
for a mortgage. That isn't a joke -- it's a fact.
When
Democrats controlled both the executive and legislative branches,
political correctness was given a veto over sound business practices.
In
1999, liberals were bragging about extending affirmative action to the
financial sector. Los Angeles Times reporter Ron Brownstein hailed the
Clinton administration's affirmative action lending policies as one of
the "hidden success stories" of the Clinton administration, saying that
"black and Latino homeownership has surged to the highest level ever
recorded."
Meanwhile, economists were screaming from the
rooftops that the Democrats were forcing mortgage lenders to issue
loans that would fail the moment the housing market slowed and deadbeat
borrowers couldn't get out of their loans by selling their houses.
A
decade later, the housing bubble burst and, as predicted,
food-stamp-backed mortgages collapsed. Democrats set an affirmative
action time-bomb and now it's gone off.
In Bush's first year in
office, the White House chief economist, N. Gregory Mankiw, warned that
the government's "implicit subsidy" of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,
combined with loans to unqualified borrowers, was creating a huge risk
for the entire financial system.
Rep. Barney Frank denounced
Mankiw, saying he had no "concern about housing." How dare you oppose
suicidal loans to people who can't repay them! The New York Times
reported that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were "under heavy assault by
the Republicans," but these entities still had "important political
allies" in the Democrats.
Now, at a cost of hundreds of billions
of dollars, middle-class taxpayers are going to be forced to bail out
the Democrats' two most important constituent groups: rich Wall Street
bankers and welfare recipients.
Political correctness had
already ruined education, sports, science and entertainment. But it
took a Democratic president with a Democratic congress for political
correctness to wreck the financial industry.
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