WELL, THAT SETTLES IT, THEN: Pelosi: Dems bear no responsibility for economic crisis.

Meanwhile, Megan McArdle is busting twaddle pretty evenhandedly. First this:

There are a whole lot of Democrats in the comments to this post who know that Bush could have and should have stopped this bubble. They don’t know what he could have done, exactly; they’re not tricksy bankers. But they’ve read, like, one and a half whole articles on the subject, so they’re sure that this is the fault of Republican ideology.

I’m so glad that I’m voting with the reality based community this time around.

I interrupt this post to note that thanks to Bill Clinton, millions of people have died of cancer in the last ten years. It seems to me that if he cared, he could have funded research that would have cured cancer. What research? I don’t know, I’m not a damn doctor. All I know is, a lot of people are dying of cancer.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

One of my commenters blames Bush for gutting the predatory lending laws at the state level. A wicked pundit would note that this is a project near and dear to the heart of one Senator Joe Biden, (D-MBNA). A less divisive voice would point out that predatory lending laws are aimed mostly at payday loans and credit cards, not housing loans. The fraud problems in the housing market seem mostly to have been perpetuated by mortgage brokers, who are still regulated at the state level. The worst problems are in Democratic-dominated California.

Plus this:

Meanwhile, I’m seeing commenters claim that the housing crisis is really all about the Democrats making lenders lend money to poor people.

The data doesn’t track you. The legislative pushes to expand lending to the poor do not match very well the subprime crisis, either in time or scope. Probably they contributed somewhat, but at best only slightly.

It would be nice if everything that went wrong in the world was a result of the scheming of our ideological opponents. But the sad fact is, stuff goes wrong. All the time. And there is usually no villain behind it.

Indeed. And she’s got lots more — just keep scrolling.