Blaming either side of the political spectrum here is useless. The truth is that both parties had an opportunity to do some sanity checking here and neither did. The Republicans have made that lack of sanity checking a part of their party platform, but the democrats have run along with the "me-too" economic policies.
But neither party was culpable for anything but negligence. The real culprits here are the financial institutions that allowed odorous debt onto their books and willfully shoved their heads into the sand. Their lobbies were active on both sides of politics, giving "advice" on what would be "good" for the industry. This short sighted perspective, thinking about the next quarterly statement as opposed to the long term viability of a business is what caused long-term financial turmoil. How could it not? No one had their eye on that goal.
It is the responsibility of investors to assume the risk for their own investment. The creation of odorous debt is as much the fault of the people loaning the money as it is the people taking out the loan, in fact it is more the fault of the lender if they deliberately obfuscate the terms of the loan (or outright provide misinformation). This is why investments have associated risks. The risk is you lose your money, it is your own responsibility to mitigate this risk. But when you're not investing your own money, there is a moral hazard where quick returns and the associated bonuses suit making bad loans.
Now a little perspective from someone who has worked with in the field of computational economics. Simple transparency regulations and documentation regulations would've averted most of the current crisis. It's a simple crisis of information visibility. Every step in the chain that created the credit problems was related to a lack of information along the chain causing a market distortion. Markets don't work properly if one party doesn't have the information necessary to determine the true value (to themselves) of an investment (this can be linked back to Goedel's completeness theorem; you can not construct a logically complete formal system unless the axioms of the system are self-consistent).
If you start at one end of the chain, requiring documentation from people getting loans is a simple visibility method which allows the market to decide properly what the risk of a loan is. Packaging this documentation with the loan in a standard way is enough to allow analysis of the risk of these loans on-mass. This way, everyone can see what they're buying. You can calculate the overall risk of even a large credit package of many loans with a few simple database queries, if you have all the relevant information provided.
At the other end of the chain, a simple visible market of products like the CDS with full disclosure of exposure and the associated risks of the products calculated in real time would've averted most of the crisis there.
This isn't the kind of distortion creating regulation you get from price fixing, or subsidies. This is the kind of regulation that prevents distortion by providing full disclosure of the information necessary for people to properly assess the value of a particular investment.
Now everyone is coming out along their own party lines, using their own ideology to explain this failure in the markets. The amusing thing is, ideology is always at it's best a logically incorrect system adopted for simplicity and at worst a myopic distortion of the facts and willful ignorance of the information systems involved. Their are very few absolute truths in a complex information system like the global marketplace and ideologies are nothing but presupposed absolute truth.
Sometimes deregulation is the right solution, sometimes it isn't. Sometime government deficit spending is the right solution, sometimes it isn't and sometimes changing of schemes like the 401k is a good idea and sometimes it isn't.
It might be wise for everyone to look around the world and research the superannuation schemes of other countries to see what has worked and what hasn't. Some countries have very robust and well thought out schemes of regulation (including what is not regulated and the limits of regulation) and while they are not doing as well, their banking systems are still profitable and their superannuation is well protected (even if it has shown negative growth of one or two percent).