Is Michael Steele about to be fired as RNC chair?

Steele has been a disaster from the git-go.

During his brief tenure as RNC chair, Steele just sat there, dazed, and watched the fiascos with Franken and Tedisco and now Specter, the embarrassments of established party players like Jindal and the incredible Palin family, the grand-mal seizures of cluelessness by new party loons like Beck and Bachmann, foolish attacks on Obama in the pirate crisis and on a hundred other issues, the whole party getting busted for impeding the response to the swine flu crisis (by impeding the confirmation of HHS officials and the appropriation of money to fight epidemics) as well as exploiting it, many legislative losses on Capitol Hill, being outsmarted by Obama on the budget and on health care, the embarrasssments on the torture issue, the exposure of many of the party's private-sector allies as arch-criminals, many embarrassments involving true party leader Rush Limbaugh, the tea party nonsense which had no effect whatsoever on Obama's God-like polling numbers, the GOP's drop in affiliation down to 21 percent of the electorate, incessant reports of disarray and civil war within the party, chaos within the RNC, and many gaffes by Steele himself. So far, as the new captain of the ship, Steele has made the captain of the Titanic look like Ferdinand freakin' Magellan.

As we know, Republicans never accept blame for their own crimes and follies. Usually they just try to blame the Democrats for everything, but that won't work this time. In such a situation, their classic Plan B is to find a scapegoat. Happily for them, they have the perfect victim, the black guy, Steele.

Republican hardliners are demanding a special party meeting on May 20, to discuss "good governance". Among other things, the hardliners will introduce a motion to strip Steele of one of his key powers, the power to spend party money. At the same meeting they plan to discuss other resolution language, including a text condemning the entire Democratic party as a bunch of socialists -- to give you an idea of the kind of cuckoo-birds who are launching this effort.

When they hold this meeting, could Steele be overthrown, or forced (or double-dog-dared) into resigning? That would be a catastrophic embarrassment for the party -- to admit, this early, that their choice for party leader was so awful. Which reflects on their ability to choose national-level candidates, as evinced by their insistence, for example, on saddling the country with the horrifying prospect of Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the Oval Office -- and the Situation Room.

An ally of Steele -- and amazingly he still has them -- screamed that Steele's enemies are trying to "neuter" the new chairman. Well, um, yeah, that's exactly what it is.