Two weeks ago, I wrote that the breakdown of the nation's financial industry was undeniably a self-induced injury; that it would finally force conservatives to own up to the wrongheadedness of their deregulatory project; that they couldn't possibly blame the disaster on any of their traditional bogeymen.

But I had forgotten about conservatives' extraordinary instincts for blame-evasion. This is a movement, after all, that blandly recasts its greatest idols as traitors once their popularity has crashed; that routinely sloughs...