Leave it to O'Reilly to come to wrong conclusion

Conservatives led by TV entertainer Bill O'Reilly are trying to sell a revisionist history of why this nation is in a financial crisis.

They blame the Democrats for pushing more home lending to areas of communities filled with people redlined by banks to avoid making home mortgages.

O'Reilly, aided by Laura Ingraham, said the policy was aimed at poor people making $20,000 a year who had no skills and no education. The FOXNEWS darling, who has tried to sell himself as a person who pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, made his insulting analysis on tonight's program.

If you have no skills and education, you're not going to be making $20,000 a year. Minimum wage is only going to guarantee you about $12,000 a year. That banks redlined communities of people of color from receiving any kind of lending is fact. That something was needed to force banks to finally consider these people for the American Dream is fact, too.

The change in federal policy did not require banks to make loans that were not properly collateralized, nor offer adjustable rate mortgages that consumers did not realize would ultimately cost their household incomes more than they could afford.

Yes, Democrats do have big blame to accept in the current financial crisis. Clinton administration deregulation allowed financial institutions on Wall Street and Main Street to get together in creative, fast-profit deals.

But favoring the financial industry with top-down socialism began with the Reagan administration and the huge bailout of the savings and loan associations. And Sen. John McCain was involved in those bailouts.

O'Reilly, who supports the mother of all bailouts, is just peddling the same propaganda -- not only about his own upbringing but good people struggling to climb up the economic ladder.