With so many different kinds of insanity flying around at once, it helps to take a step back and appreciate the holistic implosion that is happening right now. We’re in the middle of a collapse so epic that it makes the Steelers-Cowboys superbowl look dignified. There isn’t a ray of light to be found for these guys. It’s like a race to the bottom where the GOP Congress, President thimblewit, Sarah “proof that Jesus loves Tina Fey” Palin and John McCain are all desperately vying to see who can become a living punchline first. Let me count the ways.

About why Secretary Paulson asked for seven hundred billion dollars:

“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

Across the country, satire writers sadly capped their pens and bookmarked monster.com.

Katie Couric asked Sarah Palin to name a time when John McCain gave more than rhetorical support to financial regulation (he did, once). Palin came up short. In fact the entire encounter was just as much of a disaster as her last real interview with Charlie Gibson.

At least Couric got verbal response, even if it didn’t techically count as an answer to a question. Other reporters would be so lucky

McCain then looked around the room and gestured as if to welcome questions. The AP reporter shouted a question at Gov. Palin (“Governor, what have you learned from your meetings?”) but McCain aide Brooke Buchanan intervened and shepherded everybody out of the room. Palin looked surprised, leaned over to McCain and asked him a question, to which your pooler thinks he shook his head as if to say “No.”

Sarah Palin, living the feminist dream.

In related news, several pundits noted McCain’s polar swing from dissing economic concerns last Monday to hair-on-fire panic today. That sort of bipolar, crisis-to-crisis reactivity is normally taken as a sign that a person (or campaign) has no idea what is going on.

The Republican Study Committee, where the ideological stalwarts of the Congressional GOP call home, has a Very Serious Proposal(TM) : cut the capital gains tax. I wish that I was kidding. The rest of their fringe wish list makes even less sense.

…And then John McCain proposed his weird deal to stop campaigning and put off the debates. Then he put off Sarah Palin’s debate.

They’re all flailing. For a party that has trended towards irrelevance since America hit the practical limit of tax cuts and belligerent war during the first Bush term, history will remember this as the week when the GOP finally got there.

***Update***

An observation from the comments:

I’m still in shock over how terrible the Palin/Couric interview was. “Train wreck” is being charitable – it was more like a train derailing on a bridge, tumbling a thousand feet into a canyon and landing on a pile of old dynamite and gas drums. And then a jumbo jet crashed into the flaming wreckage. Followed by an earthquake that caused the whole mess to slide off a cliff into the sea, where the few miraculous survivors were eaten by sharks.

Conservatives sometimes remark that Sarah Palin must worry liberals since we can’t stop talking about her. Worry has nothing to do with it. You cannot look away.