More and more, the GOP seems willing to snatch the whole country into the toilet down which the flailing party has flushed itself.

This afternoon, House Republicans scuttled the Bush Administration's emergency bailout to save Wall Street's hide. And the McCain campaign was quick to... blame Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi.

Republicans have stopped grasping at straws this election year - now they're feverishly clawing grass, twigs and those tiny, almost-invisible wisps that bubble up on the surface of stagnant water. Republicans are caked with blame for this disaster; remember, it wasn't the Spartacist League squealing to dump all those nancy-boy regulations that so beset our credit and investment markets in safer, more solvent decades.

Plus, they've got a candidate who staged a flea-circus spoof of being "in charge" during this frightening Wall Street splatter fest - only to have his own party knife him this afternoon... ending the fiction his visage of authority brought the Beltway temperature down long enough for an agreement.

A sage no less sagacious than William Kristol Saturday condemned as pointless McCain’s comic-opera buffoonery earlier in the week - “suspending” his campaign and the debate to squeeze into tights and cape, tubbily flying to “rescue” the Republic from a disaster he helped stew up.

If a “Republican” that embedded in the current, corrupt machinery was left cold by McCain’s chaotic dumb show, we can be sure it fell flat elsewhere.

In Friday's debate itself, McCain’s only substantive statement was that he would freeze spending. Obama deftly countered that’s taking a hachet to a job requiring a scalpel. There was a lot of fuzzy nonsense about everybody pulling together down here on Main Street. No specifics, but both men were too rattled by the crisis to come up with ideas quickly.

Other than that, McCain all but married himself to Iraq, promising little more than four more years of the same bloodletting. He was passionate, passionate, passionate about the Russia/Georgia dustup - a disgraceful attempt to reignite the Cold War that leaves Americans, if anything, utterly repelled.

Oh... and forget about the National Intelligence Estimate - Iran is trying to get the bomb and we can't let 'em. Obama said he would talk. McCain promised more tough-guy posturing to a nation sick of this crap.

Obama equivocated far too much - will somebody tell him to just say it! Don't qualify, soften or sweeten! McCain was either basting himself in mauldlin sentiment or sneering creepily at his opponent. Or... not at him, per se. Jeepers - slip a hunting cap cap on this angry troll and let him stalk cwazy wabbits
 
So who's really winning? And who's just playing politics - our financial viablity be DAMNED?