Are Obama's hands really clean on "the mess?"

In his new role as the nation's self-appointed rationer of speech, President Obama said this: "I don't want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess."

The word "mess" apparently refers to the recession, the rising total of jobless Americans and the shrinking tax revenue of government at all levels.

Sure, we have other messes. Because of reckless spending by his administration and the Democrat Congress, China now holds unparalleled power to make matters much worse by stepping away from U.S. debt auctions until interest rates rise. There is also the small matter of Russian submarines patrolling off U.S. shores.

But neither of those issues would have materialized if the economy hadn't collapsed.

Why did the economy collapse? Because, for 30 years, the U.S. government carried on an aggressive policy of bullying banks and other lenders to make home loans to people who couldn't afford to pay them back.

Where was Obama while all that was happening? For much of the time, he was a community organizer in Chicago, where he worked closely with ACORN, which did its part by picketing banks that were too slow to lend to borrowers who couldn't repay the loans.

For part of the time, Obama was an attorney for ACORN.

In other words, while in Chicago, Obama earned a living by defeating free markets so as to provide benefits to people who couldn't afford to buy them.

Traditionally, banks or other local lenders had provided a check on reckless lending by limiting the maximum size of a loan to the borrower's income, a system that made repayment more likely than not.

In Washington, politicians destroyed that safeguard by setting up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, quasi-government organizations whose function was to promptly buy newly issued mortgages from local lenders. Because they could quickly unload new mortgages to Fannie and Freddie, local lenders no longer had any skin in the game. Now, they had an incentive to be reckless.

Obama benefited personally from Fannie's and Freddie's central place in home financing. After just four years in the U.S. Senate, Obama ranked as the second-biggest recipient of political contributions from the two giants.

Fannie and Freddie contributed to their friends, not their adversaries.