Bush is an idiot (which is nothing new, of course)

Bush says he won't back bill that bails out lenders
Bush only wants to help "creditworthy people stay in their homes," not speculators or lenders. He seems to have overlooked the fact that the subprime borrowers who are now unable to pay their mortgages weren't really creditworthy in the first place. That's why they needed subprime loans.

The underlying cause of this whole mess was the ridiculous notion that it didn't matter how many subprime borrowers actually paid back their loans because ever-rising home prices would protect the lenders. The only people who didn't believe this idiocy were the people who were the real lenders, the buyers of the mortgage-backed securities that were created by bundling up the subprime loans. So the various banks and brokerages guaranteed the securities, in exchange for some (all?) of the extra interest the subprime borrowers were charged for not being creditworthy.

(Then most of these banks and brokerages made this risk magically disappear off their books. Through some accounting legerdemain it was not carried as a liability, presumably because they thought there was no risk, as the ever-rising home prices would cover everything. When many of the subprime mortgages did go into default, and it turned out the homes were no longer worth what was borrowed on them (if they ever were), the banks and brokerages had to write off billions to cover the payments owed to the mortgage-backed security owners. But that's a whole different problem.)

What we now have is a bunch of people in homes they couldn't really afford when they they bought them, and mostly still can't afford now, even at their current, reduced value. The creditworthy people in trouble now are primarily people who had regular mortgages, but have lost their jobs in Bush's recession. It's fine to help these people, I suppose, but no one should be under the illusion that this is going to help very many of the lower-income people who took out the subprime mortgages. And paying for it with money from a fund designed to help poor people get homes just transfers the taxpayers' money to the middle class.

There's an awful lot of blame to go around here. Practically everyone involved in the subprime mortgage fiasco (except the securities buyers) was stupid and/or ignorant, if not an outright crook. If the government wants to reverse some of the damage that was done, it's going to end up helping some blame-worthy people, and Bush should wake up to this fact.