Dodd impressive in his hypocrisy

This morning, I suffered through the first few minutes of Good Morning America, as Senators Shelby and Dodd tried to explain to Diane Sawyer what was going on in the financial world today (banking failures, bailouts, etc.)

The moment I had to turn off the tube rather than frighten the cats and the neighborhood with screams of fury came when Dodd had the unmitigated gall to say this:

This was avoidable. This did not have to happen. Where were the cops on the beat? Where were the regulators? When these loans were made they did nothing.

Uh, Chris, you're the head of the Senate Banking Committee. You're the cops. Where were you? Taking money from the very same people who were making those risky loans. You and Obama and a dozen other Democrats who now cry the loudest about the mess the industry is in were the ones who profited most in government from the industry's fudging data over the past decade and change. It was, indeed, the do-nothing Democratic Congress which helped make this mess as bad as it is. It was a Democrat in the White House who started this mess of manure sliding downhill in the first place:

To hear today's Democrats, you'd think all this started in the last couple years. But the crisis began much earlier. The Carter-era Community Reinvestment Act forced banks to lend to uncreditworthy borrowers, mostly in minority areas.

Age-old standards of banking prudence got thrown out the window. In their place came harsh new regulations requiring banks not only to lend to uncreditworthy borrowers, but to do so on the basis of race.

These well-intended rules were supercharged in the early 1990s by President Clinton. Despite warnings from GOP members of Congress in 1992, Clinton pushed extensive changes to the rules requiring lenders to make questionable loans.

Dodd's cries now sound like the call of a fireman who sets his own house ablaze and then complains that the fire department didn't do enough to prevent the place from burning down.