Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics & Public Policy Center has found a new boogeyman for the economic meltdown: community organizers.

Kurtz says that “community organizers help to undermine the US economy by pushing the banking system into a sinkhole of bad loans. And Obama has spent years training and funding the organizers who do it.”

His evidence?

“The seeds of today’s financial meltdown lie in the Community Reinvestment Act – a law passed in 1977 … CRA was meant to encourage banks to make loans to high-risk borrowers, often minorities living in unstable neighborhoods. That has provided an opening to radical groups like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to abuse the law by forcing banks to make hundreds of millions of dollars in “subprime” loans to often uncreditworthy poor and minority customers.”

So, that’s it huh? Banks extended subprime loans out of the goodness of their hearts; President Bush never pushed for an “ownership society”; and Washington never sat on its hands instead of overseeing the financial services industry. It’s all community organizers’ fault.

UPDATE: Slate’s money man looks at conservatives’ arguments and sees a lot of specious reasoning.