1984 in 2010

Republicans everywhere appear intent to thoroughly rewrite the history of the financial crisis. When the whole Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission refused to eliminate the terms "Wall Street," "Shadow Banking," deregulation," and "interconnection" from the report, the Republican members broke away and issued their own report. How anyone can describe the financial crisis without mentioning Wall Street and deregulation will be a mystery to most people. This is a tactic often repeated by the right when they get on the wrong side of an issue. They did it with Social Security, denying that they were in favor of privatization. No lie is too big for the Republicans. They've found that if they repeat a lie often enough (and these days, cry about it) they can eventually get most people to believe them, or at least give them the benefit of the doubt.

The Republican members want to blame the financial crisis on the government--specifically Fannie and Freddie. But as Paul Krugman notes, Fannie and Freddie didn't operate in Ireland, Iceland, Spain, Latvia and all the other countries that experienced housing bubbles. To make things worse, in 2006 Peter Wallison, one of the Republican members of the Commission, roundly criticized Fannie and Freddie for not doing enough to help out low income borrowers. He argued that the agencies were lagging behind their private counterparts.

Barry Ritholtz (author of "Bailout Nation") posed a set of questions to the Republican renegades. While I doubt that they will be answered, the questions themselves are instructive.

This week Spencer Bachus, the incoming G.O.P. chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, told The Birmingham News that “in Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.”