Although I think that this would have been a stronger video without the highly partisan written commentary throughout, I think the statements of these politicians speak for themselves. From the perspective of 2009, this is almost hard to watch — not only because this problem blew up the way it did, but because Democrats very effectively pinned this crisis on Republicans in the last election, one of the reasons that Democrats won so handily.
To this day, Rep. Barney Frank continues to blame Bush and the Republicans for not effectively regulating the housing loan industry and Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae. I don’t think that setting this up as a Democrats-bad/Republicans-good issue effectively deals with the issues (trust me, I’ve got plenty of problems with a lot of Republicans right now), but I do think that if Rep. Frank adamantly opposed regulation to Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae in 2004 (see 4:53 and 6:05), he should be held accountable today when he tries to blame the Republicans for pushing irresponsible, sub-prime loans through the government. His statement is all the more outrageous when he now claims that the problem in the mortgage lending industry was apparent in 2003 (when the Republicans were in power), a year before this hearing took place. As I said above, the written comments in the video are somewhat partisan, but it does make clear that the Republicans are pushing for regulation, and the Democrats are the ones opposing it.