In 1989, Liberal Congressmen amended the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975 to require banks to collect racial data on mortgage applicants which gave Liberal groups like ACORN the ammunition it needed to force banks to be more "fair" (to use Obama's favorite word) to blacks and other minority poor in granting mortgages they could not afford.

Now you may ask yourself how any bank can make money on such ridiculous lending practices? It can't. Step in Liberal-supported Fannie Mae. Fannie Mae purchased and backed these worthless loans and repackaged them allowing the Ponzi scheme to continue for years. Bizarro. Starting to believe?

Then in 2003 warning signs went up that the Ponzi was beginning to unravel:

USNews&World Report, Barney Frank's Fannie and Freddie Muddle

In fact, here's a New York Times story from September 2003, clearly showing that the first substantive Fannie and Freddie reform from inside government came from the Bush administration. Spurred by worries that Fannie and Freddie were cooking their books and taking too many risks, Treasury Secretary John Snow proposed placing the companies under Treasury oversight with strict controls over risk and capital reserves. The NYT labeled the proposal "the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago" and noted:

Mr. Snow said that Congress should eliminate the power of the president to appoint directors to the companies, a sign that the administration is less concerned about the perks of patronage than it is about the potential political problems associated with any new difficulties arising at the companies.

So five years ago, there was one of those rare moments in Washington when the branches and personalities of government—in this case, the Bush administration—are less interested in protecting or expanding their turf than in fixing a looming catastrophe. What was Frank's response to the proposal?

"These two entities—Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—are not facing any kind of financial crisis," said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. "The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing."

Liberals want to blame this mess on greedy Wall Street. But like I said, in Bizarro World, greed is the opposite of what it is on Earth. Firms on Wall Street and central banks around the world bought these Fannie Mae derivatives, which mixed prime with sub-prime mortgages, because they thought that they were making a relatively conservative investment; read my post For God`s Sake Stop Helping the Poor. This is like calling an average Joe greedy for buying a US Savings Bond.

Making people buy things they cannot afford and then calling greedy the merchants who by force of law were forced to sell those products is so outrageously disingenuous that perhaps Bizarro doesn't even cover it.

Normal human beings, even Liberals, cannot be this egregiously stupid without some outside influence twisting their minds. It had to be a leak from Bizarro World.

Notes

(1): Since Bizarro World is in the same universe as we are in, the rip is an intra-universe version of a Lorentzian Wormhole. The tear or rip is not yet big enough to allow a sentient being to travel through it from Bizarro World to Earth, also known as a Traversable wormhole [PDF], so presently only the transmission of information is leaking through.