I must say, I’m enjoying this part of the election cycle. The Republicans just can’t stop stepping in it lately, can they? And I think the reasons for this have their roots in three great vices of the Bush Administration: incompetence, mendacity, and faith.

Bush made a lot of, if you’ll excuse me, fuck-ups. What’s worse, by trying to (keep excusing me throughout this post) spin his fuck-ups as positives — and by believing it — he made it impossible to learn from his fuck-ups and correct them.

Now McCain, and along with him the entire Republican Party, is following along the Bush template:

1. Fuck shit up.
2. Claim your fuck-ups are not fuck-ups.
3. Have faith that everything is okay.
4. Don’t learn from your mistakes. Repeat.

Now it’s okay to fuck up once in a while, as long as you learn from your fuck-ups. If you’re a political party, you can still fuck up quite a bit, as long as you’re good at blaming the other party for your fuck-ups, and (importantly) your fuck-ups don’t actually impede the workings of your own party.

But the GOP is now past that point. The extent of the fucking up is now finally affecting them. For example, McCain could admit that Palin was a bad choice for Veep. But he can’t, because

a) he can’t admit he was wrong, and
b) other people think he’s right, especially
– evangelical Christians, who do their best to live in a fantasy world, and
– the wingnut echo chamber, who always gets everything wrong.

So now it seems, the Republican Party has been fucking up things for so long that they no longer remember how not to fuck up things. When they fuck up, they tell themselves that things are great. This decreases the chances that they’ll notice their fuck-ups, fix their fuck-ups, and quit fucking the fuck up.

What I think we’re seeing here with the Palin nomination is the GOP imploding into a big sloppy pile of fuck-up.

Reality. If you ignore it, sooner or later it bites you in the ass.