Why will no American take responsibility for this mess?

Part of the problem is certainly that this is an election year; for Bush officials to admit that they were, at best, asleep at the regulatory wheel could create a ballot-box accountability that they'd like to avoid. Denial and evasion are also hard-wired into this administration; they didn't want to play the blame game during Hurricane Katrina, either. It seems Chris Cox is doing a heck of a job.

But there's a broader cultural problem, too. We have come to expect failure to be rewarded on Wall Street; we saw a few days of outrage on Capitol Hill about golden parachutes, even though the unspoken truth, now confirmed in today's New York Times, was always that Wall Street executives will continue to rake in tens of millions a year whether or not taxpayers own their stock. Now that same unaccountability is supposed to cover regulators, too.

Is there a way out of the culture of unaccountability? Hey, if Paulson can imitate the British bailout and offer direct capital infusions into shaky banks, maybe our officials can take a page from the Brits. Admit that you screwed up, and tell us you're sorry. It's a start.