WorldNetDaily’s Joseph Farah has rather desperately tried to deflect blame for the financial crisis away from conservatives and toward liberals.
His Oct. 6 column blamed Washington Mutual’s failure on its efforts to be “recognized as one of the top employers and lenders for Hispanics and sexual deviants,” asserting that lending money to them “offend[ed] vast segments of the population” and adding, “I’m not surprised that WaMu was out of business 24 hours after announcing it was catering to sexual deviants at the expense of most of its customers and actively sending profits to corrupt cultural causes.” Farah offers no evidence that the default rate of “sexual deviants” — Farah’s word for homosexuals — was any larger than, say, Hispanics.
His Oct. 7 column blamed the crisis on President Clinton because of his efforts “to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough for conventional loans.” In fact, the vast majority of subprime loans in recent years were made outside of the Community Reinvestment Act that Farah is implicitly criticizing. Further, according to Robert Gordon at the American Prospect, “In late 2004, the Bush administration announced plans to sharply weaken CRA regulations, pulling small and mid-sized banks out from under the law’s toughest standards. Yet sub-prime lending continued, and even intensified — at the very time when activity under CRA had slowed and the law had weakened.”
Farah also falsely attacks the Obama campaign for allowing ex-Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines to be “flirting with a Cabinet post in a Barack Obama administration” when he “should be breaking rocks at Sing Sing,” further claiming that the campaign “continues to find a special advisory role for Franklin Raines.” In fact, Raines has done nothing beyond taking a couple phone calls from the Obama campaign, and there’s no evidence that he serves as any sort of “special adviser.”
But then, when it comes to Obama, when have the facts ever mattered to Farah?