Arnold Kling gives Brad DeLong a good spank

which the latter really seems to need:

Over at Grasping Demagoguery with Both Hands, Brad DeLong writes,

Fannie's and Freddie's troubles make it more and more clear that the financial-market deregulation agenda of the late 1990s that Phil Gramm spearheaded was a more serious mistake than almost of any of us realized back at the time...

Let me give Professor DeLong an assignment. Find a list of all of the prominent calls for regulation of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae over the last 15 years. Then write the name of the political party or the publication who called for that regulation on the blackboard. Do it 100 times. It will help your penmanship. It might even help your grasp on reality.