Barney Frank’s talking points notwithstanding, mortgage lenders didn’t wake up one fine day deciding to junk long-held standards of creditworthiness in order to make ill-advised loans to unqualified borrowers. It would be closer to the truth to say they woke up to find the government twisting their arms and demanding that they do so – or else.

This is Jeff Jacoby writing in the Boston Globe, and it’s a lucid, hyperlinked piece (i.e., not just raw assertions but backed by actual FACTS) that lays out the entire history of the subprime mortgage debacle.

You can’t solve a problem unless you correctly identify the cause. Blaming Wall Street and the Republicans is nauseating for precisely this reason: it muddles American’s ability to understand why this all happened in the first place.

Let’s hope more of this comes out so that we can get our thinking straight before November.