This Op-Ed by Noam Neusner, a former speechwriter for the President was in Sunday's New York Post.
The New York Post
To The New York Times, the entire world is filled with grievances, and President Bush is almost always the cause. That's the only reasonable explanation for Sunday's lengthy, one-sided Page One screed on the collapse of US home prices.
First, a bit of background: I worked in the Bush White House and wrote speeches - cited in the Times piece - where the president extolled the virtues of homeownership.
Many people agreed. Homeownership under this administration rose to record levels, especially among minorities. The Times thinks this was good politics; actually, it's good policy. Homeownership is better for communities and historically, has been the surest (and sometimes the only) way for moderate-income Americans to build wealth.
We now see that some of those buyers - white and non-white - should not have taken on the financial responsibilities of owning a home. When prices stopped rising, the equity that they'd expected to build disappeared, and their homes' values dipped below the size of their loans. And so we have had spiraling foreclosures, with disastrous impacts on lenders and some investors, who themselves borrowed heavily to maximize their return.
The Times spends dozens of column inches blaming this financial trauma primarily on President Bush. Except for a pro-forma "to be sure" paragraph early in the piece, no one else comes in for criticism - not the borrowers, not the lenders, not the investors in mortgage-backed products, not the highly paid executives of the federally backed finance agencies, not the developers - and, naturally, not the Democrats, who were warned of the impending danger and could've headed it off.
Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank appear nowhere in the article - even though these two had the power, by virtue of their leadership of key congressional committees since 2006, to bring reforms to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two agencies at the heart of the housing-finance bubble.
Even before Democrats took back Congress, Dodd and Frank managed to beat back Bush administration reforms starting in 2002. Dodd and Frank repeatedly declined to consider the president's proposals, which would have probably cut down the housing froth by forcing Fannie and Freddie to stop buying risky mortgage-based investments and subjecting them to full SEC oversight.
In 2003, Frank said the administration was exaggerating the risk. Last summer, Dodd still called these ideas "ill-advised" while Frank called them "inane." The Times chose to mention none of that.
The Times notes that housing-industry leaders gave political donations to Bush. But Fannie and Freddie's biggest giving went to Democrats, including Dodd, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President-elect Barack Obama. The Times chose not to mention that.
The Times mentions that Bush gave speeches on the merits of homeownership. But Bush also spoke often of the need for reforms of housing finance: first through his budget proposals starting in 2001, and then via his advisers' testimony to Congress starting in 2002 and then from the stump starting in August 2007 - culminating in this year's State of the Union Address, and 17 other times in 2008 alone before Congress finally decided to act. The Times left that out, too.
What's perhaps most disappointing is that, thanks to its one-sided reporting, the Times missed the opportunity to explain how our government had become, by choice, an active co-investor in America's home real-estate market, carrying a lot of risk and very little opportunity for reward.
The Times could have written about who was responsible - both Republican and Democratic lawmakers. It could have written about how a few voices - including not only President Bush and his top economic advisers, but also Fed chief Alan Greenspan and Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers - had repeatedly warned of the looming danger yet failed to win necessary reforms.
The Times could've done all these things, but chose not to. Beating up on Bush, it appears, is easier.
Another mission accomplished, lol. 
