See what you will

It always amazes me how easily people can distort their view of reality to match their current convictions. This article on digg is a case in point: AP: Wall Street bankrupt by GOP failure to regulate Freddie.

The title makes clear the poster's view that that republicans failed to regulate Freddie and Fannie, leading to the stock market collapse. Presumably, the part of the linked article they see as evidence is that Freddie and Fannie hired a firm to lobby republicans against a bill that would have increased regulation (and ultimately succeeded in killing it).

As the article explains, though, democrats were uniformly against the bill already. But since republicans were in the majority, they also needed republican votes to stop it; hence, they lobbied republicans. In particular, they got "prominent constituents and financial contributors" to call their republican representatives and express opposition to the bill. They targeted republicans up for reelection, in tight races, who would be most sensitive to the views of their constituents.

In short, the poster places no blame on the large number of democrats who were against the bill, instead places it entirely on the few republicans who were against it, and hence declares the lack of regulation as the failure of the republican party as a whole (ergo the "GOP failure to regulate Freddie").

This kind of thinking reminds me of a scientist I know who looked at a graph with dots scattered randomly all over -- which he was expecting to be in a line -- and said "well, you've got outliers all over the place, but these three right here look right". Sometimes it seems like, the smarter a person is, the easier they can convince themselves of whatever they wish.