The key exchange is at 5:16 into the video:
Rachel: But Pat, you can talk about Raines being a bad guy, you can find Democrats who have been deregulators too, but this isn't a Democrat/Republican problem, this is a conservative problem. It is a tenet of American conservatism that regulation is bad and that the markets ought to be left alone. The reason that Fannie and Freddie had John McCain's campaign manager on the payroll for $30,000 a month is because they wanted no regulation, they wanted what conservatives want. I want to know how conservatives can show their face in responding to this crisis without acknowledging that their basic philosophy is at the root of it.
Pat: Well, my basic philosophy is that you don't give mortgages to people who have no credit worthiness, who have incomes that show that they cannot handle the mortgages, who don't put any money down. This was Liberalism run wild in a lot of ways. I mean pushing all that money into sub-prime mortgages-- that's not conservative banking in my opinion!
Ok, I'll concede that Pat is right in his criticisms regarding who was given the mortgages, but how do you get from "some of these people shouldn't have been given mortgages" to "it's all the liberals fault!". If the mortgage regulation laws that were in place previously were still in place today, this problem would not have happened. In fact, if the laws that are still on the books today had simply been enforced, there is a good chance that we could have avoided the problem. The only reason that those people were ever given mortgages was because people thought that they could make money off those mortgages. Had the industry been properly regulated, those mortgages would never have been issued. It's really that simple. Trying to somehow spin this as the fault of Liberals is beyond absurd.
Of course that does tend to apply to most of the things that come out of Pat's mouth.
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