The thing is, when you tell the birthday kid you're throwing him a surprise party all he can do is fake surprise when the lights go up. Since we all know that former Bush flacks have launched an organized effort to make sure people don't think any of the disastrous things that happened under Bush's tenure were his fault, the best anyone can do with following from Karl Rove is pretend they believe it:
Mythmaking is in full swing as the Bush administration prepares to leave town.
For real?
Among the more prominent is the assertion that the housing meltdown resulted from unbridled capitalism under a president opposed to all regulation.
Like most myths, this is entertaining but fictional. In reality, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were among the principal culprits of the housing crisis, and Mr. Bush wanted to rein them in before things got out of hand.
So, leaving aside the argument Rove makes later about Fannie and Freddie, his initial defense of Bush is this: Bush was a well-meaning but weak president who proved totally inept at his duty to handle the country's finances even while his party maintained a majority in Congress, because the Democrats were being really mean and stuff. Rove can't even make the argument that Bush was effective. The best thing Rove can say about him is that he was unable to do his job. That's...persuasive.
His premise is also false, while Fannie and Freddie obviously took on too much risk, the bulk of sub-prime loans were taken on by private-sector entities, and regulating Fannie and Freddie wouldn't have stopped that or the securitization of mortage debt and its sale around the world. The reality is also that whatever efforts Bush made to regulate Fannie and Freddie, he obviously didn't think it was that serious or he would have spent some serious political capital on it. The election might have gone differently if Bush had engaged in a huge public fight with Democrats over his attempt to regulate the mortgage giants before the markets first collapsed, but that never happened. Bush was too busy spending political capital on invading Iraq and trying to privatize Social Security.
-- A. Serwer
