If you bothered to watch the Today show yesterday, you would have seen former President Bill Clinton giving yet another interview related to his Global Initiative, this time indulging Ann Curry’s softball questions.

Here is the short exchange where Clinton once again denies that his administration, in part, was responsible for the current financial meltdown:

Curry: “You know this week people are gonna be reading this article in Time magazine that lists you as number 13 as, on the list of who to blame for our current economic crisis in the United States,  Should you be 13 on the list, is what I’m asking?”

Clinton: “Oh no!  But let me as you this, my question to them is, do any of them seriously believe that if I had been President and my economic team had been in place the last eight years, that this would be happening today?  And I think they know the answer to that is, no.”

(Here is a link to that exchange.  To skip over David Gregory’s introduction and the rest of the softball questions, fast forward to 2:13 in the clip.)

This guy is a piece of work.  And that is quite a defense.  His economic team??  Does he mean the team that threatened banks with fines if they didn’t make these loans to people who wouldn’t afford them?  What many people don’t know (and what the media continues to overlook) is that Clinton loosened housing rules by rewriting the Community Reinvestment Act (a product of Jimmy Carter’s) to put added pressure on banks to lend in low-income neighborhoods. 

Remember that this economic crisis began with the housing market, and it was these loans that later were converted into the complicated ”mortgage-backed securities” that bogged down the balance sheets of Wall Street firms.  These toxic loans would never have existed if Carter and, then, Clinton hadn’t created such a permissive lending environment. 

What’s more, the dirtiest little secret in politics and in our country’s recent history is that the Clinton administration had virtually nothing to do with the economic boom of the 1990s.  In fact, it was Newt Gingrich and the Republicans in Congress who ushered in a period of prosperous growth by dragging Clinton to the table and convincing him to sign a bill that cut the capital gains tax. 

It seems that we can’t go a week or a month without a Clinton lying on camera.   

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