In the right's latest attempt to blame liberals for the failures of conservatism, today's Wall Street Journal editorializes that Congressional Democrats are responsible for the widespread cancellation of American Airlines flights for re-inspections for wiring problems. Years of lax, airline-friendly FAA oversight of the sort that the Journal and the conservative movement has long advocated apparently has nothing to do with the mess. The paper's case is so desperate that it includes a self-evidently irrelevant graph showing that a lot more people die in auto than plane crashes. But the paper's broader argument is the most revealing:

There's a lesson here, and it reverberates beyond the FAA and the airline industry. Mr. Oberstar and other Democrats in Congress would just as soon do to the Food and Drug Administration and the Consumer Product and Safety Commission and other "consumer protection" agencies exactly what they've managed to do to the FAA inside of a month's time. We thought we'd left this hypernanny state mentality in the 1970s, but with this Democratic Congress it is back with a vengeance. The FAA fiasco gives us a glimpse of what the world would look like under this re-regulatory assault. It would mean that every business misstep, no matter how rare, could potentially result in industry-wide repercussions. Congress would call for more rules and greater enforcement, in the name of "safety." And regulatory agencies would respond with overkill. The cost of doing business would rise, and consumers would pay for it in higher prices, less convenience or both.

But the absence of consumer protection (no quote marks necessary) over the past seven-plus years has led directly to demonstrable harms and increased risks to the public.

The Chicago Tribune just won a Pultizer Prize for its series showing how children have been harmed due to lax oversight of consumer products. Studies have documented an alarming deterioration in the Food and Drug Administration's capacity to do its job, with consequences like the Melamine-tainted pet food and E. coli outbreak from spinach. The need to shutdown flights to correct potentially dangerous wiring problems wouldn't have happened if the FAA had been doing its job all along.

The spectacle of watching enraged conservatives flailing their fingers in every direction without pausing to look in the mirror only reinforces that the movement's day of reckoning is rapidly approaching. They, not appeasers on the left, are responsible for the debacle in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib. The hostility of Alan Greenspan toward regulation, rather than the anti-redlining legislation that people like Larry Kudlow keep spewing about, played a huge role in the subprime fiasco. And the tax cuts for the rich that were widely applauded by the Journal and the right greatly exacerbated soaring inequality while delivering none of the promised economic benefits for the rest of the country.

They can make all the noise they want, but it's time to lock them away -- preferably somewhere padded and soundproof.