Plenty of blame to go around

In wake of yesterday's failure of the House to pass the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, everyone is pointing fingers at everyone else, blaming each other for the financial crisis, and the very real prospect of financial meltdown followed by severe recession.

Well, there's no point in assigning blame to just one party when there's plenty to go around. Here's who I'm blaming, in order from least blame to most.

16. Richard Rorty. No, not really. He didn't have anything to do with the financial crisis. But his baleful influence on philosophy continues to be felt, and I didn't want to pass up the opportunity to get a bit of Rorty-hatin' in.

15. People who bought more house than they could afford and now can't make their mortgage payments. This category includes the real-estate flippers. Seriously, what were you thinking? But you get the least blame, because you thought you were only gambling with your own financial well-being, not that of the entire country.

14. Crooked mortgage brokers who sold people more house than they could afford and then passed off those shaky loans to the banks. You're just a bunch of crooks who took advantage of people on both sides of the transaction. For some reason though, I'm not able to work up that much contempt for you. It's probably a personal failing.

13. Banks who bought these shaky loans to people who bought more house than they could afford. You get more blame than the people who you were lending to, because you were gambling with the money of your shareholders.

12. Alan Greenspan. "American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage." I don't know whether anyone actually took this remarkably bad advice in February 2004, but just saying this earns you a spot on my blame list. And in retrospect, it seems pretty clear that you should have popped the housing bubble before it got too big.

11. Conservative populist douchebags who would rather have the country go through a painful recession than have the government do something "socialist".

10. Libertarian populist douchebags who would rather have the country go through a painful recession than have the government do something "socialist". I blame you more than the conservatives, because for the most part - with the exception of Objectivists, anarchists, and gold bugs - you are more intelligent than they are.

9. Liberal populist douchebags who would rather have the country go through a painful recession than bail out some rich Wall Street banker. The politics of resentment is particularly ugly, and I blame you most because you make the rest of us sensible liberals look bad.

8. Lou Dobbs. In a sane world, you'd be distributing your revolting brand of nativist populism in photocopied newletters, instead of having a job at CNN.

7. George W. Bush. You're right about the need for government action in this crisis, but you've screwed up so many times that you have no credibility left, and now no one is listening.

6. Henry Paulson. You brought a terrible, unacceptable bill before Congress, but even after it had been made into an acceptable bill by the Congressional Banking Committees, the American public could only remember how bad the original bill was. And letting Lehman Brothers fail is looking like a really bad judgment call now.

5. John McCain. While trying to shore up your bad poll numbers on the economy, you injected Presidential politics into the bill negotiations at exactly the wrong time.

4. The 133 Republicans who voted against the EESA bill, for putting politics ahead of the good of the country. You're all a bunch of mouth-breathing yahoos.

3. The 95 Democrats who voted against the EESA bill, for putting politics ahead of the good of the country. I blame you more than the Republicans, because I expect better from you. John Conyers, I'm looking at you.

2. House Republican leadership, who couldn't pull together the votes you promised for the EESA, and then blamed Nancy Pelosi for giving a "partisan" speech in support of the bill.

1. House Democratic leadership, who couldn't get 12 more Democratic votes on something this important. For crying out loud, Pelosi, you allowed your committee chairs to vote against the bill! This is not leadership!

I hope I haven't left anyone out.