Certainly, as you’ve pointed out, some large percentage of the problem is at the feet of homeowners who bit off more than they could handle. However, I would add that many others got sucked in once the market started crashing.

For example, in Florida, some 50-60 percent of the homes are for sale. Many people cannot sell without losing their shirts, not because they did anything wrong, but because the market collapsed and cut their home value in half or more. Without a bubble — created by the banking/mortgage industry — there is no mass land devaluing, etc.

In terms of fraud, I know firsthand of some banks who went into poor neighborhoods, hired a local leader to give a speech about the “American Dream” of homeownership, and then had a bank rep in the back of the room with mortgage applications. The mega-banks knew what they were doing, but could not fathom the potential outcome of mass failure.

Also, in few cases did borrowers actually get duped — here in Ohio there are whole neighborhoods which fell victim to outright fraud — so this leaves people who sought shortcuts to wealth, expecting housing to rise in value indefinitely. Why should they get rewarded for failing to honor their promise to pay? I guess I’m the fool, paying my mortgage and cutting expenses to keep doing so when I could have bailed.

“Given that the banking industry — banks in collusion with mortgage brokers and other pieces within the machine — created the real estate bust by knowingly giving loans to people who did not have the means to repay…”

You’re forgetting more than just “pieces of the machine.” How about government that sets “home ownership is a right” as an article of policy? How about people who just plain bough way more house than they could afford? How about regulations that rewarded banks for making loans and removed the risk on their behalf? How about governmental policy that kept interest rates on the floor when they should have risen? How about investors demanding returns from financial stocks quarter by quarter orders of magnitude higher than historical averages for the sector, and more appropriate to much higher-risk businesses?

Yesterday’s Journal had a piece on how the regulators — in both R and D administrations (the bureaucracy doesn’t change much with the presidency) — failed utterly in both the financial crisis and in the Gulf oil disaster. Worth reading.

My point is that there always has been a lot of blame to go around — but a big portion of it has to go to us.

As for Fiorina and Whitman, we’ll see what they’re made of come November.