Apocalypse Now?

Even if you were a diehard, left-wing, Bush-bashing Hollywood screenwriter, it would be hard to come up with a script for the Republicans as bad as the last year.

It's been one heckuva horror movie, with one scandal-plagued scene after another, and more of them as the election-season plot lurches toward its climax.

I mean, you really can't make this stuff up.

Start with a war in Iraq that has gone seriously south. Cut to a devastating hurricane and the government's botched response.

Then you have the Hammer getting hammered, as Tom DeLay gets indicted, gives up his majority leader post and then resigns.

The Abramoff scandal blows up, claiming a number of Hill staffers and, ultimately, Ohio congressman Bob Ney, who pleads guilty and says he'll quit. California congressman Duke Cunningham quits after accepting more than $2 million in bribes, including a yacht.

Just when the plot is in danger of flagging, Mark Foley--who heads the Exploited Children's Caucus, a detail that no B-movie producer would buy--is exposed as a gay hypocrite who cyberstalks former teenage pages. And House Speaker Denny Hastert and his top lieutenants offer conflicting accounts of what they knew and when they knew it.

As the Foley saga starts to fade, the FBI conducts raids in a probe of whether Pennsylvania congressman Curt Weldon tried to help clients of a lobbying firm run by his daughter and an ex-aide.

Sprinkle in the Woodward book, the Ricks book, the Isikoff-Corn book and now a book by former White House faith-based guy David Kuo who says his ex-colleagues privately referred to evangelicals as "nuts." Not to mention North Korea setting off a nuclear bomb.

And some conservative pundits are saying the Republicans deserve to lose the House.

Has anything gone right for the GOP?

Well, there hasn't been another killer hurricane, gas prices have come down and the Republicans seem to have far more money in the bank for the three-week stretch run. But the party has had an incredibly hard time buying a good headline.