NYT - The big lie - an oped on the RW lie that Freddie and Fannie caused the economic collapse [View all]
You begin with a hypothesis that has a certain surface plausibility. You find an ally whose background suggests that hes an expert; out of thin air, he devises data. You write articles in sympathetic publications, repeating the data endlessly; in time, some of these publications make your cause their own. Like-minded congressmen pick up your mantra and invite you to testify at hearings.
Youre chosen for an investigative panel related to your topic. When other panel members, after inspecting your evidence, reject your thesis, you claim that they did so for ideological reasons. This, too, is repeated by your allies. Soon, the echo chamber you created drowns out dissenting views; even presidential candidates begin repeating the Big Lie.
Thus has Peter Wallison, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a former member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, almost single-handedly created the myth that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the financial crisis. His partner in crime is another A.E.I. scholar, Edward Pinto, who a very long time ago was Fannies chief credit officer. Pinto claims that as of June 2008, 27 million risky mortgages had been issued and a lions share was on Fannie and Freddies books, as Wallison wrote recently. Never mind that his definition of risky is so all-encompassing that it includes mortgages with extremely low default rates as well as those with default rates nearing 30 percent. These latter mortgages were the ones created by the unholy alliance between subprime lenders and Wall Street. Pintos numbers are the Big Lies primary data point
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/24/opinion/nocera-the-big-lie.html?_r=1&hp
It is important to fight this and other Republican lies. (A case could be made that Peter Schweitzer did the same with Congressional Inside trading. The Boston Globe reported a study that looked at ALL the trades made for Congressmen - and they did worse than a passive index fund would have done -
http://articles.boston.com/2011-12-14/bostonglobe/30516909_1_insider-suspicious-trades-portfolio )