The Undead Big Lie

By BJ Bjornson

Ryan Chittum has a post up that documents a pretty decent push back of the mainstream press on Mitt Romney's repeat of the Big Lie of the financial crisis, that is was somehow the government's, and in particular Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's, fault and not that of the unregulated private sector.

Of course, that was Thursday. Today, glancing at memeorandum, I see one of the top stories is titled, "Facts show Fannie, Freddie led mortgage market to the collapse". Sure, its from the Washington Examiner, but it helps to show why "the government did it" remains the conventional wisdom of the right and GOP candidates.

It doesn't matter how many times the myth gets debunked and the facts are trotted out to show that it was the private sector and their speculation in toxic mortgages that were the cause of the financial crisis, you have an entire party ideologically opposed to the idea that the government can do anything good (unless it involves the torture or death of brown people, beating up peaceful protestors, or procuring expensive means to better carry out the same), while also being continuously brain washed into the belief that the private sector, left to its own devices, is the greatest and most efficient distributor of wealth that can ever be, with wondrous (and so far illusionary) self-correction mechanisms that would never allow these paragons of fiscal discipline to do something as terrible as cause a world-wide financial crisis with their poor judgement and often illegal dealings.

Combine those two points and the government just must be at fault. Anything else causes too great of a cognitive dissonance amongst the true believers, and as with every other faith-based movement, the vast majority of folks are just going to ignore the information they can't process without changing their worldview, so the Big Lie that Fannie and Freddie are responsible for the financial crisis will live a long and happy undead life, impervious to the multiple stakings of fact-based commentary.