The. Gloves. Come. Off.

For the better part of a week we have been e-mailing and calling the McCain campaign to take off the gloves, and hit Obama -- and the Democrats in Congress -- over this financial problem, including Fannie and Freddie. We could all see how this went down. But all McCain wanted to do was sweep this under the rug, and while he was doing that, Obama gained traction in his lying ads about who's at fault for all of this. Captain Ed and Geraghty the Indispensable have the skinny on how John McCain just cold-cocked Barack Obama:

Our current economic crisis is a good case in point. What was his actual record in the years before the great economic crisis of our lifetimes?

This crisis started in our housing market in the form of subprime loans that were pushed on people who could not afford them. Bad mortgages were being backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and it was only a matter of time before a contagion of unsustainable debt began to spread. This corruption was encouraged by Democrats in Congress, and abetted by Senator Obama.

Senator Obama has accused me of opposing regulation to avert this crisis. I guess he believes if a lie is big enough and repeated often enough it will be believed. But the truth is I was the one who called at the time for tighter restrictions on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that could have helped prevent this crisis from happening in the first place.

Senator Obama was silent on the regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and his Democratic allies in Congress opposed every effort to rein them in. As recently as September of last year he said that subprime loans had been, quote, “a good idea.” Well, Senator Obama, that “good idea” has now plunged this country into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

To hear him talk now, you’d think he’d always opposed the dangerous practices at these institutions. But there is absolutely nothing in his record to suggest he did. He was surely familiar with the people who were creating this problem. The executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have advised him, and he has taken their money for his campaign. He has received more money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac than any other senator in history, with the exception of the chairman of the committee overseeing them.

Did he ever talk to the executives at Fannie and Freddie about these reckless loans? Did he ever discuss with them the stronger oversight I proposed? If Senator Obama is such a champion of financial regulation, why didn’t he support these regulations that could have prevented this crisis in the first place? He won’t tell you, but you deserve an answer.

'Bout damn time! He let Obama have a week's head start before chiming in, and for that we'll criticize him. But for now he's doing exactly what he needs to do, which is not only going after Obama for his complicity in this, but also correcting the lie-filled record that Obama and his campaign have been running. And this had better not be a one-time thing. There is a townhall debate tomorrow night, and we know there will be questions about this. Tomorrow night he needs to hit him again and again over this.

Bur Geraghty's closing point is quite poignant, and it's spot-on in wisdom:

Never mind for the presidential election — if the country is to avoid a similar run of reckless bets in the future, we have to be clear-eyed about what got us into this mess in the first place.

Amen, Mr. Geraghty. Amen. The point of lessons is that you learn them. We had better learn this one, and remember how it happened so that it doesn't happen again.

We'd also like to encourage Senator McCain to inject a new word into this line of attack. The word is "scandal." That is certainly what this is if you look at all of those involved in this mess. Dodd dropped the ball. Frank dropped the ball. Why? It probably had a lot to do with the amount of money they were getting from Fannie and Freddie. Would you bite the hand that feeds you? Of course not, and neither did they. They were happy and content to keep taking the money with nary a peep about oversight. And Obama went right along with it, and enjoyed the contributions he received from Freddie and Fannie, as well. Make no mistake, this is a scandal, and McCain would go a long way in promising an investigation and prosecution of all the figures involved in this mess. We don't care if they're Republican or Democrat. If they broke the law, if they defrauded the nation, or abetted in said fraud, they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Publius II