I'm sorry, but I can't seem to gin up any sympathy for the story of a hedge fund manager sunk low by the sub prime mortgage crisis:

One by one, John Devaney sold his treasures, hoping to forestall what was in the end inevitable. He sold his Renoir and his Gulfstream, his home and his helicopter. Even his cherished yacht - gone.

But on Wednesday Mr. Devaney, who made and then lost a fortune trading mortgage investments, finally called it quits. He shut his hedge fund, and told his investors that all their money was gone too.

"I'm devastated, I'm totally devastated," Mr. Devaney said by telephone from Aspen, Colo.

Later we learn that, "The only money Mr. Devaney made last year came from his personal liquidations - some at a profit, like his Renoir, which he bought for $9 million and sold for $13.5 million."

So despite his woes, Mr. Devaney managed to scrape by on profits from his Renoir, and now he's licking his wounds in Aspen? Tough life.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, the Los Angeles Times published a similar sympathy-seeking piece on July 5 that begins:

Vicki Miller bought her childhood home in Altoona, Pa., from her mother's estate for $32,000, using a nice, traditional mortgage from the local savings and loan.

Seven years later, her debt has more than doubled, her once-significant equity has shrunk to zero and she's behind on her payments. The lender has begun to threaten foreclosure.

"I grew up here. My son grew up here. And I had hoped my grandchildren would grow up here," Miller said woefully.

A heart-tugging story, to be sure, and Ms. Miller certainly cuts a more sympathetic figure than a multimillionaire Wall Street shark.

But read on, and the sympathy starts to fade. How did Ms. Miller get herself in such deep financial trouble? She says she was "persuaded to refinance her mortgage twice into sub-prime loans she didn't really understand, along with taking out a second mortgage." Ms. Miller explains to the reporter she was not "mortgage smart."

A bit later we learn more detail:

Months later, a man knocked on Miller's door and said it looked like she needed a new roof. He promised to help her get a loan, and she wound up taking out a second $13,000 mortgage from a different lender to pay for it.

Again, Ms. Miller finds herself in an unfortunate predicament, but instead of feeling sorry for her I'm aghast at her cluelessness. Did she just think people were giving her money for free, or that she wouldn't have to pay back any debts with interest? How is what she did any different from maxing out a bunch of different credit cards?

Like Ms. Miller - and almost certainly like any other home owning American in the last few years - I received the same barrage of pitches from mortgage companies telling me I could refinance equity for cash. And even though there are plenty of repairs and improvements I'd like to make to our house, I threw them all in the garbage (along with all the solicitations from the credit card companies) because piling on more debt would have stretched us beyond our means.

So please save me the sob stories, whether it's the high-flying hedge fund manager who lost hundreds of millions because he was playing fast and loose with sub prime securities and now has to slum it in Aspen without his Gulfstream jet, or the poor, working class white woman in Altoona who kept signing papers and taking money from companies but says she had no idea what she was doing.

I just have trouble feeling sorry for either of them. Maybe that makes me hard-hearted, I don't know. Or maybe it's because I know, in the end, we are all going to end up paying for both of them when the bill for this whole mortgage mess comes due.