This is what happens when a political party plays to win instead of govern

For Republicans, government is the enemy, something to be pounded into powder until you can just blow it away. So it's surprising that they fight so hard to get control of something they just want to destroy. For Republicans, politics is all about the winning, not about the governing. It's about getting into power and getting control of the purse strings so that you can dig your grubby hand into the bag and pull out wads of cash for yourself and your cronies, and then say you have no money for programs.

They've been so successful in painting government as the enemy for so long that now that we see what happens when there is no regulation and you rely on the good graces of corporations, they are simply unable by disposition and personality to shift gears.

Honey, they broke the country.

It was already mind-blowing to think of the extent to which the Bush Administration had ruined our standing in the world and turned a surplus, peace, and prosperity into unfathomable deficits, endless war, and a future that looks more bleak than anything we've seen since the Great Depression. But yesterday, when the Republicans decided that winning its customary gamesmanship with the Democrats was more important than preventing global economic collapse, we saw just how -- dare I say it? -- bankrupt Republican ideology is.

And now that ideology, like so many rigid, authoritarian, corporatist ideologies before it, has broken the country; perhaps irrevocably:

The collapse of the proposed rescue plan for the teetering financial system was the product of a larger failure — of political leadership in Washington — at a moment when the world was looking to the United States to contain the cascading economic crisis.

From the White House to Congress to the presidential campaign trail, the principal players did not rally the votes they needed in the House. They appeared not to comprehend or address in a convincing way an intense strain of opposition to the deal among voters. They allowed partisan politics to flare at sensitive moments.

If there was any doubt that President Bush had been left politically impotent by his travails over the last few years and his lame-duck status, it was erased on Monday when, despite his personal pleas, more than two-thirds of the Republicans in the House abandoned the plan.

While there were lawmakers who opposed the package on the merits, with Election Day just five weeks away, substantial numbers decided that to favor the bill would be to imperil their own political futures. And once the vote was under way and so few Republicans were voting aye, Democrats were disinclined to force more of their members to help pass the unpopular plan.

The leaders of both parties failed, many analysts agreed, in bringing the measure to the House floor without knowing whether it had the votes to pass — a bad move at any time, but especially so in this case given the risk of the markets and the badly weakened financial system reacting badly.

And Bob Herbert weighs in:

With the fate of the Bush administration’s desperate $700 billion bailout of the financial industry hanging in the balance, Representative Darrell Issa, a Republican from California, stuck to his political playbook like a man covered in Krazy Glue. He pronounced himself “resolute” in his opposition to the bailout because to be otherwise would amount to a betrayal of party principles.

To deviate from those principles, in Mr. Issa’s view, would be like placing “a coffin on top of Ronald Reagan’s coffin.”

We are in very strange territory here.

George H.W. Bush warned us about “voodoo economics” in 1980, but the ideologues clamped a gag on him and put him on the Gipper’s ticket. For much of the time since then, the madmen of the right have carried the day. They were freed of their remaining few restraints with the ascendance of George W. Bush in 2000.

These were the reckless clowns who led us into the foolish multitrillion-dollar debacle in Iraq and who crafted tax policies that enormously benefited millionaires and billionaires while at the same time ran up staggering amounts of government debt. This is the crowd that contributed mightily to the greatest disparities in wealth in the U.S. since the gilded age.

This was the crowd that cut the cords of corporate and financial regulations and in myriad other ways gleefully hacked away at the best interests of the United States.

Now we’re looking into the abyss.

When President Bush went on television last week to drum up support for the bailout package, he looked almost dazed, like someone who’d just climbed out of an auto wreck.

“Our entire economy is in danger,” he said.

He should have said that he, along with his irresponsible Republican colleagues and their running buddies in the corporate and financial sectors, put the entire economy in danger. John McCain and his economic main man, Phil (“this is a mental recession”) Gramm, were right there running with them.