There are  few issues that have been obfuscated as diligently by the media organs of the MSM Left as has been the housing crisis that led to our current economic depression. Why, of course they would do that: the Democrats are guilty as sin! We’ve observed on the pages of this very blog the attempts to divert responsibilities for this disaster to vague, shadow conspiracies orchestrated by conservative capitalist dirigistes.

So, here’s kudos to a Pulitzer-winning journalist for the New York Times writer, a Wall Street financial analyst, and to one of my favorite old-school democrats for cutting through the murk and exposing the ugly truths to this disaster in simple, easy-to-understand terms in book summarized by Walter Russell Mead at the American Interest (h/t to smalldeadanimals.com).

Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed and Corruption Led to Econonomic Armageddon, By NYT journalist Gretchen Morgenson and financial analyst Joshua Rosner.

Walter Russell Mead is one of my absolutely favorite political writers. Though he is a confirmed Democrat, he hails from a disappearing Democrat tradition that once (long, long ago) allowed me to be proud about being Democrat. It was a time when the intellectual ferment was seasoned by the ideas of Democrat greats like Henry Jackson and  Daniel Patrick Moynihan (I sure do miss Moynihan). Mead reminds us that there remain still-flickering embers from those bygone days, before the Democrat party succumbed to a motley collection of Leftists and other pervs.

Here’s how Mead’s book review opens: “The Republican Party and especially its Tea Party wing have just acquired a new weapon of mass destruction”.

Here’s the book review.

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/06/07/fanniegate-gamechanger-for-the-gop/

Then buy the book and distribute it to your Democrat friends, reminding them that this is a pronouncement descending from the hallowed heights of the NYT. Because, as we were recently reminded, the NYT is their “god”.

Once again, a writer for the MSM leads with a sentence that implies that there is no causative relationship between two obviously related facts.  This from the San Francisco Chronicle:

California home sales surged last month even while prices plunged a record amount, as buyers snapped up bargains among the state’s hundreds of thousands of foreclosed and distressed properties, according to an industry trade group.

Had I written that sentence, it would have read as follows:

California home sales surged last month because prices have plunged a record amount….

There is a reason why it’s periodically useful for hyper-inflated real estate markets to correct:

A pair of reports released Tuesday highlighted the upside of the real estate downturn: Housing is becoming more affordable for more people across California and the Bay Area.

The percentage of households able to buy an entry-level residence in the state reached 48 percent during the second quarter, double the level from a year ago, according to the California Association of Realtors.

You can read the rest here, but any yahoo could have figured this cause and effect equation out on his or her own.