The biggest revisionist history job in revisionist history.

Courtesy of the New York Times, the sheer scale of their “Bush caused the mortgage crisis” lie is staggering. That the New York Times engages in purposeful amnesia over the 1970s to the 1990s, the Clinton Administration, the Community Reinvestment Act, or that Democrats in Congress blocked every attempt to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac leaves me speechless. To paraphrase the Nazis, if you’re going to lie, lie big… I guess.

There are plenty of culprits, like lenders who peddled easy credit, consumers who took on mortgages they could not afford and Wall Street chieftains who loaded up on mortgage-backed securities without regard to the risk.

But the story of how we got here is partly one of Mr. Bush’s own making, according to a review of his tenure that included interviews with dozens of current and former administration officials.

From his earliest days in office, Mr. Bush paired his belief that Americans do best when they own their own home with his conviction that markets do best when let alone.

He pushed hard to expand homeownership, especially among minorities, an initiative that dovetailed with his ambition to expand the Republican tent — and with the business interests of some of his biggest donors. But his housing policies and hands-off approach to regulation encouraged lax lending standards.

Mr. Bush did foresee the danger posed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage finance giants. The president spent years pushing a recalcitrant Congress to toughen regulation of the companies, but was unwilling to compromise when his former Treasury secretary wanted to cut a deal. And the regulator Mr. Bush chose to oversee them — an old prep school buddy — pronounced the companies sound even as they headed toward insolvency.

“There are plenty of culprits,” but we’ll blame Bush. The loan policies were intended to help minorities, but since we had planned a series of stories calling him a racist had he not tried to expand the program we’ll just blame the crisis on him instead. Congress refused to oversee Fannie and Freddie, but we’ll blame Bush.

Un-Bel-ievable. The notion that everybody should own a home didn’t start with Bush, it started with Jimmy Carter, was radically expanded under Clinton, and bipartisanly in Congress throughout the 1990s.

To propagate that “how we got here is partly one of Mr. Bush’s own making” is a stinking lie, wrapped in manure, stuck inside a land fill.

But like I said below, when you betray your own base it encourages your enemies to grandiose proportions.