How can anyone take the Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page seriously?

I somehow missed this outstanding piece in the Columbia Journalism Review. It highlights yet another embarrassing attack on Eliot Spitzer by the supposedly reputable Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page.

As the lenders turned frenzied in 2005 and set up boiler rooms to feed Wall Street’s escalating demand for product to turn into mortgage-backed securities and their lucrative derivatives, Spitzer continued to direct attention to the problem.

In the spring of 2005, he sent letters to nationally chartered banks demanding information about alleged discriminatory lending practices, suspecting what would turn out to be precisely the case—that subprime lenders were steering minority borrowers who qualified for prime loans into subprime products that were more onerous for them and more lucrative for lenders and Wall Street.

Again, the OCC, then led by the justly forgotten Julie Williams, stepped in on the side of big lenders and sued to stop Spitzer. The Wall Street Journal weighed in with a series of now-embarrassing editorials that took the lenders’ side in language approaching hysteria. From June 2005:

"New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer dislikes people who won’t bow to his command, so perhaps Julie Williams should invest in body armor."

That was out of bounds, even for that page. Spitzer kept at it even as he was about to leave office and reminded everyone of the fact in this Washington Post opinion piece in February of this year, probably around the time federal investigators, tipped off by the financial services industry (Hmm. I wonder if…nah), found he was shuffling money around to pay for prostitution.

If you think, by the way, that his prostitution bust means Spitzer was wrong about predatory lending, my advice would be to check your 401(k).