The strange, random breakdown of the Republican Party

Thirteen hours before it's scheduled to begin, America still doesn't know if John McCain is even going to show up for the first scheduled debate between himself and Barack Obama.

McCain suspended his presidential campaign to single-handedly fly back to Washington and save the financial bailout he'd just finished telling us we had to accept, as bitter a pill as it is... and then he riled up the House Republicans into scuttling the deal at the eleventh hour when they had, as an alternative, a hastily-compiled one-page list of bullet points.

Even conservative pundits like Ed Rollins, who was thirstily gulping the Palin Kool-Aid after the RNC convention, now say on-air that the choice was weird and desperate, and at best, bought McCain a little free air time and post-convention bounce, with no thought given to how she'd survive the rest of the campaign, much less actually do the job of vice-president.

It's astonishing that the failure of Washington Mutual -- the biggest bank failure in history -- is practically page-two news today, crowded out of the headlines by the spectacle of an entire political party collectively shitting its pants and finger-painting the walls with it.

Since I'm rooting for the other guy, you'd think this willful self-destruction would make me giddy, but I'm a little bit frightened about how this is all gonna pan out. McCain and his fired up cadre of House Republicans are lashing out so blindly, at their own party and president as much as their "enemies," that it's borderline psychotic. It's as if they're saying "if we can't have the country, and implement our unfettered free-market mania even after all this, then no one can."

Are they really this willing to let the entire economy seize up like an engine with no oil? To score points back home? I thought the blame was going to be shouldered equally, by all these lawmakers who knew this would be a bitter pill for their constituents, but also knew this had to be done to prevent the immediate, short-term destruction of large sections of the economy.

I'm watching all of this unfold through a vicodin haze -- I'm getting a root canal this morning -- but I don't think I need drugs for it to be completely unreal. Maybe I've read too many apocalypse novels, but I can't help but feel like these are the days we'll be describing to our children when they ask us where we were when it all started to unravel.