What a strange spectacle the GOP Convention turned out to be, a bizarre portrait of a major party in implosion. I don’t know where to begin. Actually, yes I do: Sarah Palin. I’m not outraged by her political inexperience, her shameless use of her family as a political prop or the McCain camps inability to vet. I’ve been alive the last 8 years and have become accustomed to a Republican party that’s big on ideas and lousy on execution. It’s no surprise that McCain would choose style (I love her hair) over substance (she’s hardly the most qualified Republican woman to be Veep).

What shocks me is how the GOP still doesn’t seem to get what’s happening to themselves. There was a time where I would have been happy to vote Republican. I want a strong government with limited reach, I believe that personal liberty is sacrosanct and I genuinely believe the government should be in the position of creating opportunities for its citizens as opposed to doling out taxpayer dollars. But the GOP hasn’t been that party in decades and in St.Paul this week we saw the nadir of the conservative movement. In the binding together of John McCain and Sarah Palin, the Republicans seem to think they’ll have given themselves a fasces that they can use to maintain political power. But to an outsider the McCain-Palin ticket is the political equivalent of the jackalope, an entertaining spectacle for an hour or two, but too preposterous to believe.

The Republicans have lost this election. I’m certain there’ll be more twists and turns in what has turned out to be the strangest election in modern U.S. history, but it’s over. It’s over in spite of McCain’s attempts to bring back some semblance of the old G.O.P., We saw in convention speech after convention speech, in the shameless and vile 9/11 video that dishonored the memory of those who died that way by using the graphic images of their deaths to forward a political viewpoint and most of all, in the craven decision to put a social conservative who would ban abortion for all women and who debates the merits of creationism on the ticket, the death of the Republican party and the rise of this new thing– a Christian Fundamentalist party.

It’s no surprise then that as you looked around the Xcel Center this week, the word “Republican” was nowhere to be found.

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