Ignorance or dishonesty. Take your pick.

Carter is trying to blame our current economic crisis on Bill Clinton, and on Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac. Here's what he said at a recent speech:

"(Former President Bill) Clinton started the groundwork for the problem with easy credit," [Carter] said. "Soon we were seeing more homes sold than ever before by a factor of five. These mortgages were sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were private corporations, but their packages of mortgages were sold all over the world and treated as if they had the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. But they had no definable value. ... There were billions of dollars in credit that couldn't go on the market."

This is just garbage. Pure partisan garbage.

The "easy credit" that Carter refers to has a lot (everything?) to do with deregulation of the finance industry. President Clinton was indeed supportive of this deregulation -- but it is either ignorant or dishonest of Carter to try to lay the blame at Clinton's feet. The principle piece of deregulating legislation was pushed by Phil Gramm and Dick Lugar -- both Republicans. (Many people believe Phil Gramm is the #1 person to blame for this mess.) And we all know that it is the GOP that loves deregulating everything. Even if Clinton had opposed the deregulation, he faced a Republican-dominated Congress that probably could've overridden his veto. And it was the GOP Congress and the Bush Administration that continued these deregulatory attitudes and policies, leading to our current predicament.

As for Fanny and Freddy -- well, conservatives have been trying hard for some time to blame these institutions for our current mess, primarily because these institutions are popular among Democrats. Most conservatives have given up on pushing it, however, because this GOP myth has been thoroughly debunked. (See here, here, and here, for example.)

Not John Carter, though. He still wants his constituents to believe that Clinton and Fanny/Freddy are to blame. In other words, he wants you to think it's all the Democrats' fault.

So, let's get this straight: We've had a GOP congress for 12 of the last 14 years, and a GOP presidency for the past 8 years, leading up to this economic meltdown. And the Federal Reserve had been led, until just three years ago, by conservative free-marketeer Alan Greenspan (who recently admitted that his deregulatory ideology turned out to be flawed).

Yet John Carter wants you to believe that conservative deregulatory dogma and the GOP had nothing to do with where we are right now. According to Carter, it's all the Democrats' fault.

There are only two possibilities here: either Carter is utterly ignorant of the history and economics of the situation, or he is being dishonest about things.

Not exactly what we want in a Representative, is it?