The Law of Large Numbers tells us the Republican Party is bound to get its act together sooner or later. One of these days, someone within or without the party is actually going to hit the fairway, if only by dint of repetition. Some, probably within the GOP base, would call such sentiments an expression of faith, hope for the evidence of things not seen, which is not entirely misplaced; spin the roulette wheel enough times and the ball is eventually going to click itself into your slot.

    This is cold comfort for the gambler who is down to his ride, and the GOP is running out of chips. Washington Post columnist Harold Myerson detailed the carnage in his Friday column. "The dizzying downward spiral of the Republican Party continues apace," wrote Myerson. "Yesterday, the Pew Research Center released a survey showing that the percentage of Americans who answer to the name Republican is down to 22 percent -- about as low as a party can go in a two-party system."

    Ouch.

    Several of the Republican Party's leading lights were on full display last week - Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage specifically - and if you squinted at the transcripts of their remarks, they almost sounded like a united front on the attack against all things Obama. Any open-eyed review of their performances, however, reveals a disorganized, messy assault upon each other and the party itself.

    Former vice president Dick Cheney led the way with a truly preposterous and self-serving defense of each and every discredited, disgraceful Bush-era "War on Terra" policy, up to and including torture. The networks ran it back-to-back with an address by president Obama explaining why the US no longer uses torture, why torture is a comprehensively bad idea, and why his administration is moving in a better and wiser direction. The comparison could not have been more stark. Cheney didn't really even need to speak in order to further damage his party; 75 percent of America only has to see his face to remember why the GOP has lost the last two elections by shattering margins.

    Mr. Cheney was joined in the media spotlight by his daughter, Liz, who once again made the rounds to explain how her father isn't really the deranged, blood-drinking sociopath he comes off as. Bloggers at Crooks and Liars caught a telling exchange between Liz Cheney and her CNN interviewer on the question of what her father's motivations are for going so public so often of late:

L. CHENEY: I don't think he planned to be doing this, you know, when they left office in January. But I think, as it became clear that President Obama was not only going to be stopping some of these policies, that he was going to be doing things like releasing the - the techniques themselves, so that the terrorists could now train to them, that he was suggesting that perhaps we would even be prosecuting former members of the Bush administration.

    "Perhaps we would even be prosecuting former members of the Bush administration," she said. Methinks daddy has been losing sleep contemplating life on the wrong side of some stout gray bars.

    Last week also saw Colin Powell enter the intra-GOP fray in an attempt to drag his party back from the extremist abyss. "I believe we should build on the base because the nation needs two parties, two parties debating each other," said Powell. "But what we have to do is debate and define who we are and what we are and not just listen to dictates that come down from the right wing of the party. If we don't reach out more, the party is going to be sitting on a very, very narrow base. You can only do two things with a base. You can sit on it and watch the world go by, or you can build on the base."

    The right wing of the party listened carefully and closely to Mr. Powell's remarks, and then promptly told him to get bent. Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh led the charge by denouncing Powell as a member of the "stale, the old, the worn-out GOP that never won anything."

    Really, Rush? The "stale, old GOP" he denounced managed to win two presidential terms with Eisenhower, two more with Nixon, two more with Reagan, one with the elder Bush, and two more with the inferior Bush. Minus the time Watergate cost Nixon, that comes to approximately 34 years of Republicans in the White House since 1952, which is a pretty healthy rate of success, and never mind the twelve years of near-total Republican control of congress that lasted from 1994 to 2006, along with the series of far-right Justices elevated to the Supreme Court. Once could very easily argue that the GOP only started its current losing streak when guys like Limbaugh became real players in the party.

    Fellow right-wing radio host Michael Savage might have had something to say about that, but he was too busy attacking Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly. It seems Savage was miffed at Limbaugh and O'Reilly for not rising to his defense after Britain barred Savage from entering the country, and was not shy about venting his spleen at them during his radio show:

And yet here in America, I've had some people come to my aid. They see the bigger picture. They're not like O'Reilly; they're not like Limbaugh, who's the biggest disappointment of all. Limbaugh has turned out to be the biggest phony of all of them, all of them. Amongst all of them, he is the biggest fraud. Rush Limbaugh is a fraud. When he was accused of the drug usage, I supported him. But that man is a one-way street. It's all about him. He's in it for nobody but himself.

    And if all this clown-car foolishness wasn't enough already, there was a report out of Texas concerning GOP Gov. Rick Perry, who famously denounced the Obama administration's economic stimulus plan before stoking several silly weeks of talk about Texas seceding from the union. I don't want your commie-pinko stimulus money, said Perry, and if you're not really nice to us, we're going to become our own country.

    Not so much for all that, as it turns out. "While Gov. Rick Perry is criticizing Washington bailouts," reported The Associated Press, "state lawmakers are planning to use $11 million in federal stimulus money to help rebuild the badly burned Texas Governor's Mansion. Perry has railed against federal bailouts and what he called the free-spending, power-hungry ways of Washington. In January, he said Texas was endangered by Uncle Sam's 'audacity.' The $11 million for renovations would come out of the $700 million rescue package for Texas."

    The mind reels.

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