Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ) both appeared on This Week with George Stephanopoulos to discuss the state of the economy. Schumer, always the media whore, couldn’t resist invoking the Republican bogeyman, Herbert Hoover, and comparing him to Bush. Thankfully, Kyl was also on the show and didn’t let Chuck off the hook so easily.

Transcript provided by News Busters:

CHARLES SCHUMER: It shouldn’t have come to this. Had the administration acted more procatively earlier, particularly about the housing crisis, when many of us were asking them to, we wouldn’t have gotten up to this point. And unfortunately this administration has sort of a Herbert Hoover mentality: don’t do anything. And we’ve learned over 100 years of economic history that smart, measured government involvement, to try and deal with problems in the economy, particularly to prevent innocent people from getting hurt makes a great deal of sense, and yet every time we propose something, particularly on the housing market, which is the bullseye of this crisis, the administration says no.

And again:

SCHUMER: The things we’ve proposed, George, are much more modest, but the administration, with its sort of, again, Hoover-like, hands-off, no-government-involvement attitude, has said no.

Enter Kyl for the kill:

JON KYL: Well, first, I wondered how long it would take my friend, Chuck Schumer, to blame the Bush administration here. Of course, it wasn’t the Bush administration, as much as it was Democrats in congress, who were pushing the lending institutions to get out there and lend more money, even to unqualified buyers. To minorities, to the poor, to the young, so that everyone could own a home. The Bush administration was somewhat to blame for that, as well. But Democrats in congress were making that push. And as a result, a lot of people took loans who couldn’t qualify. In fact, they didn’t have to qualify. No money down. There was no credit reporting. And a lot of them, frankly, couldn’t afford it. So, let’s don’t blame the Bush administration for this.

 

And as to Hoover, it’s Senator Schumer and his Democratic colleagues who want to raise taxes, like Hoover did when he refused to allow the Coolidge tax breaks to stay in effect and put in the Smoot-Hawley [a tariff-raising law widely blamed as a cause of the Great Depression]. And they of course, are opposing the free trade agreements that the president’s trying to bring up. Let’s understand that the Bush administration is trying to be pro-active on the tax and trade fronts.

What Kyl said about the lending is 100% correct and it irritates me to no end how that has been ignored by the media. I even wrote about this several months ago. The Federal Government was the one that created this sub-prime meltdown going on. Just as Kyl said, it was pressure from Democrats in Congress and leftist groups like ACORN that pushed the lenders into granting mortgages for people who had obliterated their credit and wouldn’t, nor shouldn’t, have qualified had the standards not been relaxed. Then when the crap hits the fan who was the first to scream about it? Wouldn’t you know it was the same politicians who advocated for it to begin with and these jerks have the nerve to stand up and blame the mortgage companies and accuse them of predatory lending just to protect their own behinds at election time.