One of the talking points I’ve often heard from the right wing about the sub-prime crisis is the idea that it’s the fault of liberals and minorities: liberals for passing legislation that forced banks to take on bad loans, and minorities for eagerly buying into loans they should have known they could not pay for. The contention is that liberals, in their blind, unthinking ways, wanted more minorities to have homes, and minorities, being grabby and not too bright, overreached and precipitated the crisis. This ties up the scandal into a nice, neat, right-wing trifecta: you get to move conservatives and their still-favored deregulatory practices out of the picture, make the bankers into unwilling participants and even victims, and heap blame and scorn upon lefties and the lower-class dark-skinned people you look down upon so much. Bush, the Republicans, the deregulation they passed, and the banking industry are all innocent; stupid liberals and minorities are to blame. Of course, these charges are demonstrably false, but that doesn’t stop the meme from becoming firmly established on the right wing.

Nor is this hardly anything new. Remember how, when Hurricane Katrina hit, the fact that Bush dawdled for five days and completely blew relief efforts was handled the exact same way: it was, the right wing claimed, the fault of (1) local Democrats (specifically Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin) for not declaring a state of emergency (Blanco did) or using local buses to move people (Nagin did), and (2) the minority-rich population of New orleans for being too stupid to leave before the storm. Thus, the claims went, Bush, who reportedly begged Blanco and Nagin to declare the emergency (he didn’t, it was the other way around), was not to blame for the disaster that ensued. For weeks afterward, the right wing distributed false and misleading email messages which heaped despicable abuse and outright racist slander which was designed to vilify the people of New Orleans and thus make people less inclined to care about Bush’s ineptitude in helping them.

But this is the pattern: blame liberals and minorities. Immigration? The left loves minorities so they go soft on immigrants and immigration offenses while the dirty Mexicans walk all over us! (Pay no attention to the fact that corporate America is the actual villain here.) Elections won by Democrats? The liberals were guilty of election fraud, assisted by minorities within ACORN! (Pay no attention to the fact that ACORN was slandered, there is very little election fraud, and what there is is more right-wing than left.) Where only one or the other can be attached to a scandal by any stretch of the imagination, then only one is implicated–but whatever the problem, it’s always Democrats and minorities somewhere who are supposed to be behind it all.