There's an interesting discussion in my private e-mail about blamethrowing, the sport of responsibility deflection one sees in Washington when the fan is on and the shit is flying. I elaborated on some of the history of this economic crisis a post or two ago and the links there are worth your while.  

Here in the heartland we have a saying that when you point your finger in blame there are three fingers pointing back at you.  Our biggest guilt is succumbing to instant gratification, but the notion that instant gratification is realistic comes from a leadership vacuum in Washington where generation after generation is assured, through deficit spending, that you can have it all and you can have it now.  When we lack leadership in prudence and morality leadership by example is all we have left. 

If I had to draw a pie chart illustrating where the blame lies for this fiscal fiasco lies it would be something like 10% us, 20% big business, and 70% big government, which includes both parties.

Even as a conservative I will concede that a big part of Government's role is to protect us from the wretched excesses of big busyness.  But whose suppose to protect us from the wretched excesses of big government?  Open question.....Bueler?  Anyone?  The answer is.... drum roll please....US!  There's only a couple of problems with that; our only accountability tool, elections, are designed and controlled by big government and funded by big business. We are "the forgotten man" writ large.   

The crisis is the result of big government mindset deliberately waged by one party and routinely appeased by the other for the sake of political survival.  You don't have to be a political scientist to figure out which is which.

A brief recap of the fiscal mess, started in 1936 with Fred (FDR), was exacerbated in 1967 with Fannie (LBJ), tweaked in 1978 with Carters fair housing act, turbo-charged in 1999 under Clinton per the NYT article, and blew up in 2008 under Bush II, so, of course, just like everything else, it's all his fault. (one of the unfortunate quirks of our system is the disproportionate hits any President takes for events that happen "under their watch")
 
I might be off on the exact years here, and sincerely do not mean to lay this entirely on the Democrats doorstep, BUT these remain more than coincidental facts.  Just as factual though is that Republicans occupied the White House for a majority of the intervening years and are just as guilty for allowing the problem to fester.

The interesting thing I find is that while most folks from both sides of the aisle, either grudgingly or not, all agree the collapse of FANFRED was definitely the hole in the economic dike that gave way - - to this point no one has the cajones to even hint that it was a bad idea at its inception, which it was, or God forbid, it should be dissolved.  On a related matter, why all the yammering to clean up Wall St and handcuff CEOs when the government is, at the very least, equally culpable?  

So then, we are at a point where the entire political class determined that it's in the country's best economic interest for the government to hold the paper on 70% of our homes.  If this is the case the left/right philosophical battle is over - - conservatives didn't win. In the period following WWII the people, through the ballot box, decided that predictably unreliable and demonstrably incompetent government is the preferred economic control mechanism over the imperfect yet reliable, albeit accidental, competence of the free market. 

Government will now dominate housing, pensions, education, which the coming powers that be plan to extend down to age 3, and have a very aggressive plan to assume control of our health care. That begs a real head scratcher - - why the hell are liberals so angry?

The "cradle to grave" thing is pretty much covered and somewhere Karl Marx is collecting bet money from Adam Smith.  Pity, it was such a great country, one whose true promise is about to be derailed on a scale with what might have happened had the union not been saved by Lincoln.  One is left only to pray for survival of the coming train wreck, or cling to our God and guns.