New York Times, Meet The New York Times

The paper really ought to know what its past stories have said before it tries again to paint George W. Bush as the worst president in this country’s experience, if not the worst leader in world history.
 
A recent effort climbed over all sorts of difficult obstacles in making it seem that a chief factor causing the current financial mess – housing mortgagers extended to bad risks – was Bush’s fault. The story offered various qualifications, telling us at one point that there “were plenty of culprits” besides Bush, but there is no getting around its prosecutorial tone.
 
For starters, it was showcased with a three-column color photo, above the fold on the front page of this past Sunday’s paper and, beyond that, consumed two open pages inside it’s A-section, displaying more color photos, a fancy graphic and pull-out quotes.
 
In this tale of how Bush wanted to foster home ownership in the United Sates, the Times dismissed exculpatory factors with a wave of the hand, used language implying Bush should somehow have known what virtually no economist in the country professed to know and seemed oblivious to worse miscalculations by Democrats.
 
It could have corrected this latter flaw by visiting its archives, such as a Times story published Sept. 30, 1999, during the Clinton administration. It told of how Fannie Mae was  “easing credit requirements on loans” in order to “increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers.”
 
“In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times,” the story said, adding: “But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the saving and loan industry in the 1980s.”
 
Jump ahead now to a story that ran just months ago, on Oct. 19 of this year. It was about Henry Cisneros, head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Clinton and an official who “loosened mortgage restrictions so first-time buyers could qualify for loans they could never get before.”
 
The story quotes Cisneros as pointing the finger at others while also conceding that “people came into homeownership who should not have been homeowners,” and saying as well that the “country is paying for that . . .”
 
There is absolutely no doubt that liberal Democrats were in the forefront of encouraging bad loans and that this was one reason among others for the calamity the country now faces.

Although Bush himself also pushed for policies extending homeownership, he did begin to catch on during his first term about dangers at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and fought for years for regulatory reform.
 
The Times acknowledges as much while giving considerable say to a hyper-critical politician who might have a lot to answer for. The paper says Bush refused to go along with a compromise bill even as it – fairly but with a sense of skepticism _ does quote a White House official as replying that this bill would have accomplished nothing.
 
There’s nothing wrong with the Times examining the Bush record on housing and how that may have contributed to the current economic downturn,  and it’s not crucial that any such story try to offer a total history of easy loans to people who might struggle to repay them. But what you have here goes beyond that to laying excessive blame on Bush, despite past stories with a different version of things.
 
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: Speaktojay@aol.com.