First came playwright David Mamet’s brilliant springtime essay, “Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal.” Now novelist Orson Scott Card is blowing spring breezes into the autumn of our discontent with his recent column, “Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?” Some of you will remember Card’s brilliant Ender’s Game (1985) and its also award-winning sequel Speaker for the Dead (1986). Some will have noted his regular columns, which combine a novelist’s eye for detail with journalistic savvy. Card has described himself as a Democrat but now takes on both journalists and Democrats, noting: “These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable.”

The “facts,” he said, don’t point to John McCain or the GOP, but to “Sen. Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting subprime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.” Card doesn’t stop there, blasting Obama for hiring as his housing consultant disgraced Fannie Mae chief Fred Raines. “If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama,” Read on.

And if you missed it the first time (or doubt Card) read these and other related clips from a House Financial Services Committee hearing in 2003.