Bear with me while I vent for a moment. On financial reform, there are clear villains in the political process: Mitch McConnell, the US Chamber of Commerce, etc.. But at this point I’m accustomed to that sort of thing.

What’s frustrating is the way people who favor reform keep getting pulled off into side issues and obvious misinterpretations.

If you want to push too-big-to-fail as a key issue, fine; but please don’t say that resolution authority is encouraging too-big-to-fail, because we don’t have anything like that for smaller banks. Aside from the fact that you’re lending aid and comfort to Mitch McConnell, it’s just not true: the whole point of resolution authority is to recreate for shadow banks the same kind of authority the FDIC already has for smaller, old-fashioned banks.

If you want to argue that Wall Street is corrupt, fine; but don’t use emails showing Goldman employees crowing over their success in shorting housing — which is ugly but doesn’t amount to wrongdoing — to make your point. (Use the rating-agency emails instead; S&P may not be a vampire squid, but it did enormous harm).

If you want to condemn Obama administration officials for being too Wall-Street friendly, fine — but don’t charge those officials with outright corruption, of sharing private information with Wall Street, unless you have some real evidence; and don’t pretend that potential Greek default, which has many fathers, proves your point.

My sense is that too many people are taking the easy route of going for the cheap slogans instead of thinking things through; and some people are pushing their signature issues even when the evidence clearly shows that they’re wrong. And we can’t afford that kind of self-indulgence.