Lou Dobbs is a douche nozzle

Seriously. Every night he has this national televised pulpit in which he rails at...the most powerless among us and the people who support their efforts to stay afloat. And he lies and misrepresents in the process.

In times of unrest, it’s amazing how quickly some people will go to finding some way to scapegoat the least powerful among us. One of the themes reverberating around right wing world is that ACORN and the Community Reinvestment Act are to blame for the sub-prime mess, as this segment on Lou Dobbs echoes here.

It goes back to something known as the Community Reinvestment Act that passed in 1977. The law ordered banks to make loans to low and moderate income people. The Consumer Rights League says ACORN stepped in and used that law to pressure banks to lend to sub prime borrowers, even those who couldn’t demonstrate the capability to pay back the loan.

Catch all the barely hidden subtext? It’s all these “community organizers” (hmmm….remind me, whose resume has been scoffed at for being a community organizer?) FORCING these poor, hapless banks to lend money to these shiftless low and medium income people, and worse, illegal aliens (Dobbs’ personal scapegoat for all things wrong with America). How dare these leftist grassroots groups (tied to the Democratic Party, naturally) cause the ruin of the American financial system with their demands?

It’s easy to see how this would appeal to right wingers like Dobbs, Malkin and Savage . Too bad it’s not true:

The Community Reinvestment Act caused financial institutions to lend to people who weren’t credit worthy. This is crap. The CRA was signed into law in 1977 — over 20 years before the current crisis. The second problem with this theory is the CRA only applies to banks and thrifts. Most of the mortgage lending during the last boom came from — mortgage lenders who aren’t regulated by CRA. I explained this all in more detail here.

There is no issue that the rich and powerful Dobbs and his ilk won't try to forge into yet another aspect of the Culture Wars of the 1970s. Immigrants are responsible for an epidemic of leprosy. Victims of redlining in the 1970s -- the 1970s -- are responsible for the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008. There is no attack too ridiculous for him to "report on." No line of attack too scurrilous to make on the poor.

The most common complaint about him, at least from other journalists, is that his program combines factual reporting with editorializing. But I think this misses the point. Americans, as a rule, are smart enough to handle a program that mixes opinion and facts. The problem with Mr. Dobbs is that he mixes opinion and untruths. He is the heir to the nativist tradition that has long used fiction and conspiracy theories as a weapon against the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese, the Jews and, now, the Mexicans. . . .

Why is he still employed by CNN?

And I wonder who cuts his "lawn."