Abu Wabu

We all know Barney Frank is a god-damned liar, but it's important that we pause to appreciate just what a monumental god-damned liar he really is. Verum Serum has the perfect case on which to meditate:

Here's Barney Frank last week doing what Barney Frank does: lying.



And here's Barney Frank in 2005 doing what Barney Frank does: lying.



By then, of course, Frank had stopped blowing Fanny Mae chairman Herb Moses and was seven years in to blowing the world economy.

Ed Morrissey follows up:

Only a politician could lie with such a lack of conscience, but with a surfeit of sanctimony.

His “Bubble? What bubble?” performance in June 2005 should become required viewing for anyone who wants the real history of how the economy collapsed. In another addition to the Someone Left The Irony On Department, Frank scolds the people behind the dot-com bubble for not having realistic business plans while Frank protected Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from regulators who warned that the two GSEs had the same exact problem. And Frank was right that the housing collapse wouldn’t be as bad as the dot-com pop — but in fact it was much, much worse, thanks to Congressional action that mandated the creation of mortgage-backed securities that spread the poison of bad loans throughout the global financial system. The dot-com bubble burst resulted in a mild recession, but Frank’s supposedly-impossible housing bubble collapse sent the entire world economy crashing into a heap.

Clueless? A liar? In this case, Frank qualifies as both.