Washington has dug a trillion-dollar hole. Fortunately, select puts offer traders a million-dollar shovel to dig themselves out. Sometimes it seems that public prominence magnifies our oh-so-human flaws. Bad habits and character defects that we all share become crises that can destroy a company, a market or even an economy.

We have all put off dealing with something unpleasant — weeding the garden, changing the car’s oil, telling the doctor about that odd bit of dizziness, whatever — only to have it snowball into some kind of crisis.

The grown-up thing to do would be to confess that we have created this problem, and then bite the bullet, take our medicine, start up the chain saw, or in certain cases, pay the mechanic to replace a cracked engine block.

However, there seem to be stages to these things, akin to Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief. First we deny the trouble. Then we blame someone else.

When you or I do it, the consequences are usually minimal — or at least, merely personal.

But when those folks who are supposed to steward our nation’s money fail to act as adults, when blue-chip CEOs, megafund managers, investment bank managers and Washington regulators put off, deny and blame, their prominence magnifies these human flaws to awesome economically threatening proportions.

Right now in Washington, they are blaming:

“It can’t be our fault that banks are failing. SOMEONE did SOMETHING bad. And that someone must be punished!”

For decades, Washington has allowed the big banks to run rampant. In the name of “deregulation,” they allowed them to lend money to folks without jobs. They allowed them to bundle that paper into junk bonds. And they allowed Wall Street to buy and sell those bonds as if they were genuine gold certificates.

And now the whole deal is collapsing like the house of cards it always was.

Now I am not necessarily condemning this. From a purely Darwinist point of view, these guys played a fool’s game, and anyone who got sucked in to their “free money” scam could be said to deserve their just deserts.

If you “buy” a house with no money down and pay only interest, then you cannot complain when you have to leave it behind. It was never really your house. You had no equity interest. You were renting!

If you buy a trillion dollars worth of bonds without truly understanding that only the top third had any real defined value, then you are a fool who deserves to be bankrupt. There is a nice bed down on Skid Row with your name on it.

If you lie about it, you should be punished. There are ample laws already on the books pertaining to frauds of this nature. Their core ideas date back to the Code of Hammurabi. These days we are a tad more merciful. Commit fraud, and you go directly to jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.

If you claim a libertarian bent — if you prefer to allow the free market to act on its own — then you must accept when it acts badly.

Unfortunately, we are human, and are not content to reap what we have sown. And so in Washington, our surrogates deny, patch, cavil and blame.

The rate cuts failed. Rather than rescue the economy, billions of “free dollars” have pushed inflation to its fastest yearly rate in more than two decades.

The rebate checks failed. June’s tepid 0.8% retail sales gain is a farce, comprised entirely of higher gas prices.

And the bailouts are failing. “It’s just Bear Stearns, really! Oh wait, maybe Lehman, too. And Indymac. And Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac…”

So now they threaten and blame. In the heartland, terrified depositors in line at bank branches were threatened with arrest if they did not accept that they could not access their cash.

In Washington, SEC Chairman Christopher Cox is heaving about subpoenas in an attempt to find out who “talked down” the quasi-federal mortgage banks over the weekend.

As if we needed a tipster to tell us what the hell is going on here?

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