Conservatives love to trot out pet talking points and half-truths to support their arguments in favor of all sorts of agenda-driven politically extreme positions. The one I like the most is about how "the Democrats" caused the Great Recession because Democrats signed the legislation that deregulated the banking and housing industries.
This "fact" is used to support the "conclusion" that the financial collapse of 2008 was somehow deliberately perpetrated by Democrats, thereby alleviating all the guilt from "false accusations" by liberals that that poor mistreated Republican President George W. Bush had anything to do with the whole thing. He was just a victim of circumstance, you see.
All those well-rehearsed conservative talking points are just noise from the death throes that constitute the end of the GOP. These radical extremists from the right wing love to raise points like "Democrats signed it into law," and "Democrats voted" for this and that. It's like Ted Cruz now claiming that he didn't cause the government shutdown of 2013. Heck, he didn't even want it to happen. And all the right-wingers are nodding their heads in unison, and smiling away. There! See? It's a liberal policy or two, and a liberal Democrat or two who caused that horrible shutdown….
Right-wing foolishness. And it is BELIEVED right-wing foolishness. "Democrats signed it!"
This line of reasoning about the Great Recession, if it can be called reasoning, does have just one valid point weaved into the fabric of distortion that is this argument. Democrats did vote for some legislation. That is the nature of law-making governance. Stop the presses. Democrats vote for bills in Congress. Wow.
The truth is that money and deep-pockets interests bought their way into politics on this issue, as in so many others. Lobbyists for mortgage banksters and brokers swayed government (both parties) to deregulate in the name of "free-market capitalism." For those not paying attention, free-market capitalism has always been one of the primary interests of conservatives, not left-leaning liberals.
Deregulation of banking led to merger after merger, and resulted in monstrous too-big-to-fail conglomerates. Since the early 1980s, free-market ideology and decreasing regulation have predominated in politics, to the detriment of our nation's financial well-being. Blaming Democrats for this crisis is about as short-sighted as anyone's opinion could possibly be. The Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980 was introduced by a Democrat (the particularly scaly Fernand St. Germain) and signed into law by a Democratic president (Carter). St. Germain was head of the Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs, so we can rest assured that he benefited from extensive exposure to deep-pockets money.
Only a fool would submit that Democrats are invulnerable to lobbyist's money. We've all seen the bumper sticker: Bribery happens. Or something like that. But only a fool would submit that Democrats are "primarily responsible" for the financial collapse that resulted from the deregulation that for all practical purposes DEFINES the conservative principle of free-market capitalism.
Personally, I wish the creatively-inclined revisionist history types like Ted Cruz and the "Democrats signed it" airheads, with their climate-change denial in hand, could suffer the consequences of global warming all by themselves. Then the rest of us, who actually do respect science, believing that it has a valuable place in the world, could just stand back and watch.
The corporate take-over and manipulation of what used to be news reporting has led us here, where otherwise intelligent people spout ridiculous corporate-sponsored talking points based on lies and manipulated facts, in support of billionaires who couldn't give a rat's butt about what happens to the world or its people, so long as their profit margins increase. It must be awful to be such a tool, but guess who is buying guns as fast as the manufacturers can crank them out, just because "Obama is coming for our guns!"
Of course, that could be "just my opinion," but it could be just a little more than that, too. Don't forget to vote.