If the headline on a recent Associated Press dispatch failed to alarm you, you can’t have been paying attention: “Bush Confident Sweeping Measure Will Stabilize Economy.” That was scant hours before the House rejected Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s Wall Street rescue plan, thrashed out over a long weekend of intense congressional negotiations. As a rule, the more confidence President Bush expresses, the worse things are.

How and why the administration allowed what even cautious commentators describe as “the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression” to deteriorate until stopgap emergency measures couldn’t wait would appear something of a mystery. Even with a manifest incompetent like Bush in the White House, if there’s anything Republicans are expected to understand, it’s money.

Well, think again. In the short term, it’s actually not so mysterious. Until the impending failures of Lehman Brothers and insurance giant A.I.G. threatened a meltdown of the entire Wall Street credit market, with potentially catastrophic effects on the U.S. and world economies, it appears that Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke were counting on limping past the November election in the hope that a newly elected Congress and president-elect might deal with the problem in a less fevered climate.

Instead, we get to watch our dysfunctional political system at its absolute worst. As recently as Sept. 15, GOP presidential nominee John McCain, who has manfully admitted (and just as manfully denied admitting) that he knows very little about economics, was assuring audiences that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” On Republican talk radio, see, it’s been an article of faith for months that Democrats have been falsely talking down the economy for political purposes.

So when Speaker Nancy Pelosi correctly, if somewhat intemperately, under the circumstances, pointed out that Bush inherited budget surpluses, turned them into massive deficits and continued to preach deregulation even as heedless speculators turned the U.S. banking system into the world’s largest roulette wheel, GOP congressmen got petulant and killed the bailout plan. The poor babies got their feelings hurt. Then they went running back to their districts to spend the Jewish holiday campaigning as champions of Main Street.

Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks got it right: In their “single-minded mission to destroy the Republican Party,” he wrote, GOP congressmen “have once again confused talk radio with reality.”

Live by Limbaugh, die by Limbaugh. In the bombastic radio host’s upside-down world, it’s not Paulson and the White House who are responsible for the bailout bill, but Democratic “thieves” scheming to use the crisis to raise taxes on the “little guy.” Is it necessary to point out that Paulson’s bailout proposal contains no taxes at all?

Meanwhile, there’s Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s contribution to the debate. It’s worthwhile quoting in full. Pressed by CBS’s Katie Couric, who asked if it might not be a better idea to help middle-class families than rescue the big financial institutions that created this mess, Palin responded as follows:

“That’s why I say I, like every American I’m speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping the — it’s got to be all about job creation, too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So healthcare reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And trade, we’ve got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, scary thing. But one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we’ve got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that.”

In short, sheer gibberish. Palin has no clue.

What with McCain donning his Mighty Mouse costume, pretending to suspend his campaign for all of 36 hours, and rushing to Washington to save the day by championing a three-page proposal it’s been reliably reported he hadn’t actually read, his hand-picked vice-presidential candidate turns out to be somebody you wouldn’t hire to prepare your own tax return.

Not that the Democrats have covered themselves with glory. Pelosi ought to have known better than to schedule a vote on the bailout plan without knowing whether she had the votes. It might have been smarter to let the Senate, where passage is all but certain, vote first. Barack Obama has been something less than scintillating, coolly keeping his distance while Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank do all the heavy lifting.

One thing’s clear: Republican ideologues have created yet another fiscal disaster; adult supervision will again be required.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner. You can e-mail Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com.