Has Barney Frank No Shame?

Instead of admitting his own responsibility in the current financial mess, Barney Frank does what he and Democratic partisans always do when their records are called into question: attack conservatives.  It’s not the same blame he attempted to ladle out when Bill O’Reilly pressed him.  Now the Massachusetts Congressman is accusing conservatives of racism:

U.S. Rep. Barney Frank claims conservatives are trying to partly blame the nation’s economic woes on black people.

“This is an effort I believe to appeal to a kind of anger in people,” Frank, a Newton Democrat who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, today told a Boston foreclosure-prevention forum.

Frank charged that conservatives aim to shift blame for the market meltdown away from Wall Street and toward minority-lending laws like the federal Community Reinvestment Act.

Um, Barney, if you bothered to read the conservative stuff, you’d find they’re looking at more than just the Community Reinvestment Act. It’s not they, but you who are trying to shift the blame.

What is it with liberals? Instead of taking responsibility for their own messes (or, in the case, their own involvement in a mess which had many authors) and blame others.

Unable to acknowledge conservative arguments, Barney Frank has decided that Republicans harbor racist sentiments.  I guess he just borrowed a page from the liberal playbook.

He’d rather level false and absurd charges against conservatives than accept his responsibility. Once again, let me repeat, in the interest of recovering from this financial mess with plunging further into recession, Barney Frank should resign from the House Financial Services Committee.

Ed Morrissey who alerted me to Barney’s latest comment provides a nice summary of the conservative view of the mortgage meltdown which I provide below the jump (H/t JammieWearingFool):

The CRA was only a small part of the cause of the collapse. It affected loans only at the margins. The Clinton administration opted for more aggressive enforcement, and “community organizers” like ACORN used that to file nuisance complaints that could keep banks from merging and acquiring other banks. That may have pushed lenders into lowering standards on a handful of loans, but only to enough of an extent to avoid government sanctions.

In that sense, the CRA is a bit of a red herring. The real cause of the collapse was the Congressional push for Fannie and Freddie to support subprime lending by purchasing the paper from lenders, which is related to the same policies that generated the CRA but isn’t the CRA itself. Lenders make money one of two ways: keeping the paper themselves and getting the interest over the term of the loan, or selling the paper to someone else for a guaranteed short-term profit. When Fannie and Freddie began buying all of this paper, they created a huge demand for subprime loans — and lenders responded by offering easy money to almost anyone who applied. They threw out income requirements and equity thresholds (such as down payments) and generated tremendous short-term profits for themselves … while Fannie and Freddie assumed all the long-term risk.