I don't get how quickly people have been able to blame the borrowers for this

I get it, people aren't as smart as they should be...they're not great at reading the fine print, they could have been more responsible.
But come on...we know that the banks were fully incentivized to hand out these loans and we know that they handed them out to people who weren't at all financially qualified for them. And they did it in the form of Adjustable Rate Mortgages...house payments that would soon skyrocket.

And I'm sure that there were plenty of buyers who wondered if they weren't getting in over their heads...who convinced themselves that they could make this work. But ultimately, people believed that it was up to the banks to assess the risk on any given loan...and if the banks had confidence in their ability to pay it back, why would someone be so quick to deny themselves the American Dream in light of that?

So I partly blame the misconception that the banks were playing it straight. People counted on the banks to do right by themselves, to not hand out loans that couldn't be paid back. Do you think that the average Joe knew that these banks had no vested interest in whether or not they were paid back? That the banks were actually packaging these loans up and selling them off to eventually become someone else's problem? Shoot, do you think the average Joe knew what an MBS even was (mortgage backed security)?

If the argument is that they should have...that they had a responsibility to read the fine print. It seems like you'd have to actively ignore the fraudulent way in which the banks processed these loans to believe that. Not fully disclosing the nature of an adjustable rate mortgage, the robo-signing that went on. You have to believe that although the banks acted fraudulently, that its likely that they didn't coerce people into signing loans that they couldn't afford. That despite what we know to be true, the banks were up-front with people about the risks, they didn't actively pursue a signature, they weren't at all trying to convince people that they could make home ownership work.

Despite the billions of dollars the banks were raking in, the unabashed pay-offs to their executives in the form of bonuses out of the pocket of the American taxpayer, the complete lack of ethics we've seen from the banks during this whole fiasco...and Fox News et al, many conservatives still blame those that ended up losing everything. It doesn't just not make any sense, IMO...shoot, its not even just strange logic, but its pretending like we don't know something that we clearly know. That the bank executives literally made out like bandits, made millions off of the misfortune of the little guy and have unabashedly been wholly without shame through the entire fiasco, paying themselves hundreds of millions in bonuses courtesy of the taxpayers who kept their companies from going under.

Shoot, they're back to their old tricks again...conservatives are still arguing against oversight, and are still blaming the people who were, with the bank's help, apparently stupid enough to think they could participate in the American dream. Because how dare those bastards. Poor people are just the worst!

This is creepy as hell, IMO. The money is in charge here...not the truth...and that should be scary to any American IMO. That we blame each other, rather than the true culprits.