I’ve run out of patience with tired memes and discredited claims by fools and partisans.

The rhetoric of those pushing nonsense on the public in an attempt to confuse rather than illuminate  — the phrase is “agnotology” –  only serves to aid the lobbyists working on behalf of the Banks and Investment houses to maintain the status quo.

All is well, nothing to see here, move along.

Well, its time to put up or shut up: I hereby challenge any of those who believe the CRA is at prime fault in the housing boom and collapse, and economic morass we are in to a debate. The question for debate: “Is the CRA significantly to blame for the credit crisis?”

A mutually agreed upon time and place, outcome determined by a fair jury, for any dollar amount between $10,000 up to $100,000 dollars (i.e., for more than just bragging rights).

I can’t help but applaud this. No matter how many times it has been shot down, the blame-the-CRA myth keeps coming back to life. As TWI has explained, the CRA, a 1977 anti-redlining law, didn’t even cover the unregulated lenders who made most of the subprime loans during the housing boom. There’s simply no evidence for this assertion.

The movement to blame the CRA started during the fall campaign season, seized by conservatives as a convenient scapegoat for the financial crisis. It  came back to life recently, when bloggers like The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle picked up on Clusterstock postings by John Carney, once again citing the CRA as regulation gone wrong.

As McArdle put it, the CRA’s role in the crisis is “understated by liberals who are unwilling to admit that regulation, too, can produce hideous unintended consequences.”

Felix Salmon at Reuters has knocked down most of this. But I’d like to add something that’s regularly missed in the CRA debate. What the anti-regulation types miss is that the CRA never was much of a regulation to begin with. As Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance, which covers the subprime industry, told TWI, lenders never took the CRA all that seriously to begin with. The lending industry viewed the CRA as an extremely loose regulation. Lenders joked about how you’d have to mug an elderly, disabled, minority woman in a wheelchair to lose your positive CRA rating.

How that got turned on its head so that the CRA has become a symbol of regulation gone wrong is an example of what happens when idealogues who don’t know how an industry really works take over the debate. If Ritholtz’s bold offer gets some of this out on the table — and then off the table for good — it’s all for the better.

Salmon reports that Carney may be willing to take up Ritholtz on the challenge. So let the games begin. And let them put an end to the blame-the-CRA movement for good.

The tale comes from Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture, who had a contract with publisher McGraw Hill, which owns the Standard & Poor’s credit rating agency, for a book on the financial crisis to be called “Bailout Nation.” Ritholtz said he was well aware his publisher owned a ratings agency, but his contract also called for him to have final editing control. Still, things didn’t work out, once McGraw Hill got a look at his chapters detailing the failings of ratings agencies. They’ve been blamed for contributing to the financial crisis by giving high ratings to risky mortgage-backed securities, as they were collecting fees from the investment banks that issuing them.

From Ritholtz:

When it came to chapter 14 — Who is to Blame? – there were issues about the style of what I wrote about Moody’s, S&P and Fitch’s. I literally called the ratings agencies and investment bankers “Pimps and Whores;” I accused them of engaging in pay for play (buying ratings) payola, etc. Rather than describe it, I will simply post the original version here.

Ritholtz got some pushback from an editor, but still figured he could tell his story:

Now, before you assume I am an idiot for doing a book that was critical of the ratings agencies with a publisher that owns S&P, understand that I properly anticipated this. My contract gave me Final Edit. Not only that, I had previously discussed this issue months earlier with then publisher Herb Schaffner. (He was laid off in a big Q4 round of firings).

Sometime over the summer, Herb informed me that the ratings agencies discussions would have to be handled “delicately and diplomatically.”

I responded, “Sorry, Herb, but I don’t do diplomacy.” If they wanted someone who was subtle or diplomatic, boy did they have the wrong guy. I offered to return the advance check and we could all move on. He backed down, and I assumed — apparently quite wrongly — that this was the end of this issue. How can you write a book on this subject and not lambast the ratings agencies?

Well, apparently you can’t, at least not in this case. Editors wanted more changes in the ratings agency section, but Ritholtz said no way. He told them to cancel his contract, if they wanted to go that route. McGraw Hill did.

The publisher said in a statement the book was canceled because of conflicts over editing and sourcing, not because of criticism of the ratings agencies; Ritholtz denies that.

In the end, as the financial system continues to teeter on collapse, “Bailout Nation” and its story of the behavior of credit agencies during the subprime boom still awaits the light of day.