The right stumbled a bit after indisputable evidence emerged that the market's great Invisible Hand has been doing little more than, shall we say, "chokin' Kojak" these past seven odd years.

First there was the rather incoherent rambling about Disco-era dummocrat laws causing the crisis. Then came the wild-eyed racist ranting.

But Jim Angle has saved the day with a masterwork - and I mean that seriously. I haven't seen anything that comes close to it on the left, unless one counts This American Life's "Giant Pool of Money."

Naturally, the piece is one obnoxious lie after another, which in toto puts recent history into a mindblowing alternate universe. And of course it follows the McCain camp's lead in channeling Everyman's rage at The Man toward poor minorities and their Democrat enablers. But the underclass bating is so understated, the bemused "I told you so" tone and common-sense logic so elegant, it's eminently convincing if you're searching for a narrative.

You can watch the whole thing here, but to truly appreciate it one has to take it apart piece by piece. Below are what I think are the most powerful copy and images.

(Hume the Head:) In the recent spate of government bailouts, buyouts, and rescues, The federal takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are arguably the biggest of them all. And those two firms are also, arguably, the biggest reasons for the credit crisis in the first place. So the question arises: How did this come to be?

[cut to Senate hearing]

(Elizabeth Dole:) "My constituents and indeed taxpayers across the country are asking how we arrived at this crisis. It is infuriating."

(Angle narration:) Senator Dole and others think they know the answer, and its something the Senate tried to fix three years ago, but was thwarted

(Dole:) "...to the mismanagement of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which was made possible by weak oversight and little accountability."

[Accounting scandals blah blah...]

(Angle narration:) To placate those in Congress who watched over them, Fannie and Freddie promised to do more to help poor people get mortgages. That led them to buy riskier and riskier home loans from private lenders, creating incentives for everyone to make shakier loans...

Would you invest in this worn out neighborhood and these worn out people?

...Eventually they [the GSEs] bought trillions of dollars worth of mortgages, a substantial portion [!] of them based on poor credit then resold many of them to financial institutions, who thought they were safe because the federal government was behind them...

What did the Fannie chief and this shady borrower have in common? That's right, they're both... balding Democrats!

...And so shaky mortgages spread spread throughout the system. But in 2005, the Senate banking committee, then chaired by Republican Richard Shelby, tried to rein in the two organizations by passing some strong new regulations. All the Republicans voted for it. All the Democrats, including current chairman, Sen. Chris Dodd, voted against it....

Smirk at the jerk

So that's how we got into this mess, and how we missed a chance to avoid it. Getting out of it now will be a lot more difficult.

The end. There's a lot packed in there - not least a succession of wild-ass untruths. That a "substantial portion" of the GSEs' portfolio were bad loans is the bullshit keystone of the whole structure of lies. There's the whacky-ass timeline, in which the Republicans spot and try to stop Fannie Mae pumping crap into the system in 2005 (why did they not warn the simpletons on Wall Street?).

But the power is the story and the characters. Republicans are scrappy, muckraking reformers who saw it all coming, proposing "some strong new regulations" three years ago.

Most amazing is how what should be the biggest actor - Wall Street - gradually fades into the background and in the end become a non-entity. First it is incentivized (oh how the cons love that word) by the GSEs to "make shakier loans." Then it is duped into buying the GSEs shitty loans "because the federal government was behind them."

And finally, the bad mortgages simply "spread throughout the system" without any help at all from the free market wizards. Why, it wasn't Wall Street the Invisible Hand was jerking off all that time, it was that little bastard Chris Dodd!

Bravo, Mr. Jim Angle. It's not easy turning pornography into art.