From: Fox News, Cheney Says Nobody Saw Economic Crisis Coming, 1/8/09

Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday that he sees no reason for President George W. Bush to pre-emptively pardon anyone at the CIA involved in harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists. “I don’t have any reason to believe that anybody in the agency did anything illegal,” he said.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Cheney also said that Bush has no need to apologize for not foreseeing the economic crisis.

“I don’t think he needs to apologize. I think what he needed to do is take bold, aggressive action and he has,” Cheney said.

“I don’t think anybody saw it coming,” he said.

From: Think Progress, Cheney: No One Could Have Predicted The Financial Crisis, Just As No One Foresaw 9/11, 1/9/09

Oddly enough, in today’s White House press briefing, Deputy Press Secretary Scott Stanzel insisted that the Bush administration “saw those [financial] problems on the horizon,” but it was Congress’s fault for taking “a long time…to act.”

In reality, many economic experts — such as Nouriel Roubini, Dean Baker, and Paul Krugman — did predict the economic crisis; the Bush administration just wasn’t listening to them. In reality, administration officials often turned a “blind eye to the impending crisis.”

From: Huffington Post, Bush Administration Weakened Lending Rules Before Crash

The Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed, buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed. It ignored remarkably prescient warnings that foretold the financial meltdown, according to an Associated Press review of regulatory documents.

Related: Andre Eggelletion: “What’s so wrong with admitting when you’re wrong?”