You'll often hear conservative commentators on FOX News and other stations putting the blame for the country's mortgage meltdown on the poor and on the federal agencies that tried to get them into homes.

Their reasoning goes like this: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with other advocacy groups, pushed to get lower-income residents mortgage loans so that they, too, could enjoy the benefits of owning a home. Of course some — but certainly not all — of these new low-income homeowners have fallen into foreclosure.

That's enough, though, for many commentators, not to mention members of the general public, to finger the poor and the agencies who work with them as the real culprits for the housing mess the country is now experiencing.

You can see an example of this at The Business Insider's Clusterstock column written by John Carney. Carney targets Sonia Sotomayor, Pres. Barack Obama's nominee for a seat on the Supreme Court, for the time she served on the board of a New York state agency that provided discount mortgages to low- and middle-income buyers. Sotomayor served on the board from 1987 to 1992.

Carney writes that Sotomayor aggressively pushed for loans to low-income home buyers. He does graciously acknowledge that Sotomayor's term on the board did precede our current mortgage meltdown by two decades, so she can't be directly held responsible for the problems we're now having. However, he does blame the policies that she and others pushed as causing the problem.

There's a huge flaw, though, in Carney's reasoning, and in the reasoning of everyone who blames loans made to low-income buyers as the cause of the housing and mortgage problems our country is now facing: Yes, bad loans made to low-income buyers is one of the reasons why so many homes are now in foreclosure. But it's only one of the many reasons for this.

In fact, you could argue that it's the upper-middle-class home buyers who are to blame. After all, aren't they the ones who took out adjustable-rate mortgages with artificially low initial interest rates just so they could squeeze into home that were a little nicer or bigger than what they could actually afford? When those adjustable-rate loans adjusted, and their mortgage payments suddenly jumped, these middle-class buyers could no longer afford their bigger, more luxurious homes. Hope they enjoyed them while they had the chance.

Of course, this isn't fair, either. The middle-class greed buyers, again, are just one small part of the problem. The entire mortgage-lending industry is to blame, everyone from sleazy mortgage brokers to greedy borrowers to easily pushed around appraisers to real estate agents who never warned their buyers against purchasing a home that just might be too pricey. And don't forget the government officials who did nothing to stop this, or the members of the media who gleefully wrote story after story about how rich everyone was getting buying and selling real estate.

I suppose it's easier to find one villain in this story. And it's especially easy to blame the poor. It's much harder to face the real truth: There were countless villains in the mortgage-lending disaster.