Alan Greenspan always provides great theater whenever he appears in public. You can practically smell the gravitas oozing out of him whenever he sits at one of those hearing-room tables, adjusts the microphone, and begins to intone as only Greenspan can intone—obtusely. The former Maestro of the Federal Reserve, as sharp-witted and marble-mouthed as ever at 84, is putting on a one-man show on Wednesday for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

The commission was set up by Congress to investigate the causes of the financial crisis, and nobody warrants investigation more than Greenspan, whose actions, both as monetary czar and regulation opposer, are widely credited with precipitating the crisis. This time, there will be none of the genuflecting that was so typical when he appeared before Congress to expound opaquely on monetary policy or aim a Gatling gun at some regulatory proposal inimical to his objectivist (a kind of libertarianism on steroids) worldview. Wednesday’s performance is more likely to resemble his stride down the Villa Dolorosa before a House committee in October 2008, in which he famously admitted that there were chinks in his antiregulation philosophy.

Hey, the public needs ritual flagellations just as much as they did in Salem in the 1600s. In its first two days of hearings in January and February, the FCIC heard testimony from the likes of Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein and John Mack of Morgan Stanley, as well as a passel of regulators. It’s great to see people like that squirm—great, but not enough. Indeed, those four words, the ones ending in “not enough,” are a fairly good way of summing up the FCIC’s work so far. Something obvious has been missing.

If you look at the FCIC’s mission statement, you can see that it sets forth an almost-complete list of areas of concern. There’s ”fraud and abuse in the financial sector” and “accounting practices,” but nowhere do I see “how Congress got us into this mess.”

The FCIC does aim at “Federal and State financial regulators, including the extent to which they enforced, or failed to enforce, statutory, regulatory, or supervisory requirements.” But if it wasn’t for Congress, it’s conceivable that financial regulators would have done their job, and the financial crisis might have been far less severe, or perhaps wouldn’t have happened at all.

Congress was responsible for putting two foxes—their names were Harvey Pitt and Christopher Cox—in the chicken coop called the Securities and Exchange Commission, and then sitting by idly while the feathers flew. The Senate nonchalantly confirmed these two hard-right opponents of regulation to head the SEC, and then was “shocked” when they went on to do an abysmally poor job of supervising the big Wall Street banks.