Mickey Kaus doesn't know how to read

Mikey Kaus' latest blog post is really quite peculiar. Slate's conservative blogger responds to a post by Ezra Klein in which Klein lauds Eliot Spitzer for spotting early and working to combat some of the abusive lending practices that helped lead to the current financial meltdown. Here's the passage from Klein's post that Kaus quotes:

Unfortunately, our belief in the importance of equal opportunity and nondiscrimination is too often forgotten when it comes to the debate over whether and how to police the market for home mortgages. In poor and working-class communities across the nation, predatory mortgage lending has become a new scourge. Predatory lending is the practice of imposing inflated interest rates, fees, charges, and other onerous terms on home mortgage loans--not because the imperatives of the market require them, but because the lender has found a way to get away with them. These loans (which are often sold as refinance or home improvement mechanisms) are foisted on borrowers who have no realistic ability to repay them and who face the loss of their hard-won home equity when the all-but-inevitable default and foreclosure occurs. ...[snip]

In these circumstances, government must step in to curb predatory lending and encourage the flow of fairly priced capital to sectors where it is needed and will be well-used. Filling a gap left by federal inaction, state enforcement efforts in this arena have centered on identifying the valid economic criteria considered in mortgage underwriting and compelling lenders to focus on those factors--not on preconceptions, prejudices, or predatory instincts--in determining how to price home mortgage loans. The point is not to protect people from their own bad decisions or, conversely, to guarantee that mortgages be granted to specific persons or groups on specific terms--that would violate the principle of market freedom. The point is to support equal opportunity and to ensure that borrowers are charged rates and fees based upon their status and qualifications as economic actors in the mortgage market, not upon their diminished access or market savvy or their race.

And here's Kaus' peculiar rebuttal:

You make the call ... but I say Klein's easily impressed. What's Spitzer saying here? Is he saying the lenders shouldn't make these loans or that they should make these loans on more favorable terms--in which case the loans would have been even bigger money losers, leading to a bigger meltdown, no? Spitzer invokes the threat of action against "race" discrimination without any sense that official pressure toward affirmative-action style lending would help cause the subsequent mortgage collapse....

Now, call me dense, but how in the world can you assume, as Kaus does, that Spitzer's proposed solutions would have led to an even worse financial meltdown when Spitzer explicitly criticizes martgage lenders who made loans that borrowers could not possibly repay:

"These loans (which are often sold as refinance or home improvement mechanisms) are foisted on borrowers who have no realistic ability to repay them and who face the loss of their hard-won home equity when the all-but-inevitable default and foreclosure occurs."

And when Spitzer demands that lenders make loans that reflect a borrower's ability to repay, rather than his desperation in the face of widespread red-linning:

The point is to support equal opportunity and to ensure that borrowers are charged rates and fees based upon their status and qualifications as economic actors in the mortgage market, not upon their diminished access or market savvy or their race.

I'm at a loss to explain this, other than to say that Kaus is so blinded by opposition to anything that smacks of "affirmative action" that he is unable to digest the actual substance of such a proposal.