NYT:

“It was not a graceful exit,” said Representative Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, as events swirled on Friday.

No shit.

What has happened to the Republicans? The last week of their congressional session was supposed to be a high point -- where they pulled out all their legislative sucker-punches, rope-a-doping the clueless Democrats as they began to roar back towards November victory. The storyline would be the same as always, those intrepid GOP power players regaining their characteristic mojo off the back of national-security issues, and all would be right with the world. You could feel The Note writhing in anticipation.

(Seriously, does anybody still read that garbage? It's become the most vapid, idiotic, senseless repetition of Beltway blather that you can get on the Internet. At least the newspaper pundits put their sycophantism in vaguely serious, intellectual terms -- I swear to God, if Mark Halperin cracks one more joke about the "Daddy Party" or the "Gang of 500", I'm going to find him and kick him in the nuts.)

Anyway. After the jump, we'll see how wrong they were, and how the Republican position has disintegrated.

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Abramoff! NIE! Woodward! Mark Foley, for crying out loud! The disasters have come hard and fast; barely a day could go by before some new atrocity came splatting itself onto computer screens, most of which are still percolating and which threaten (Foley especially) to explode into a huge, multiple-career-ending mess. And that's not even considering the torture debate, which I maintain benefitted us a great deal (there is something to be said, long-term, for casting a party as "pro-torture").

But what's more important, from the eye of a political strategist, is not the emergence of these scandals ("What poor luck, chaps!") so much as the way the GOP handled them. Foley is the best example, as it didn't involve the still-somewhat-cogent White House but rather the House leadership -- and they've gone absolutely bananas. I mean Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. There is not a shred of political coherence to any Republican's response: "Hastert knew about it!" "No he didn't!" "Yes he did!" "I don't remember!" "I told someone else!" "We knew nothing!" "We only knew part of it!" "Foley lied!" On and on and on.

These are not signs of a cover-up, as some commentators have suggested -- these are signs of running for cover.

Josh Marshall put it very well:

I'm not sure I've ever seen this big a train wreck where leaders at the highest eschelons of power repeatedly fib, contradict each other and change their stories so quickly. It's mendacity as performance art; you can see the story unravel in real time... When you see Majority Leaders and Speakers and Committee chairs calling each other liars in public you know that the underlying story is very bad, that the system of coordination and hierarchy has broken down and that each player believes he's in a fight for his life.

The emphasis is mine, because it points to exactly what I'm saying: these guys are no longer working in tandem. They are panicking. As Kos put it, "the wheels are off the bus."

You know what I really wonder about: why the hell is Tom Reynolds (R-NY) involved in this at all? Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-LA) said he'd heard about the emails from the page (who was from his district) and passed the information on to Reynolds, chair of the NRCC. OK. What does the campaign, especially in the off-season when this supposedly happened, have to do with an internal disciplinary matter? Why wouldn't you go to the Ethics Committee, the Speaker, the Page Program... WTF? And once it goes public, why the hell would you mention Reynolds' name specifically, especially considering he was in a tough reelection fight already? Either Alexander's an idiot, he has a personal vendetta against Reynolds, or (as one MyDD diarist suggested) Reynolds is being made the scapegoat. And frankly none of those options speak particularly well of the party's damage control.

T.S. Eliot, or some other poet (what do you want, I'm a Gov major), told us that the world would end "not with a bang but with a whimper" -- he or she had a point, but in political terms it seems more like a lot of continuous bangs. And the decline of the Republicans is following that trend, as this avalanche of disasters builds to its inevitable conclusion; there's a wonderful quote from that same Times article.

"It’s not exactly like 1994, but it reminds me of 1994," said Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, who remembered a series of political mistakes that seemed to cascade. "Every day you would wake up and say, 'What is going on here?'"

Try and tell me every member of the Republican caucus isn't asking themselves that question. Try and tell me that this road leads anywhere but a big disaster. The feeling in my gut is that the Grand Old Party is becoming the Donner Party, and fast.