In the final moments of any classic horror film, as the last ghostly images spool out on the screen, the monster at issue - Frankenstein's electric zombie, Godzilla, whatever - assumes an almost sympathetic figure. In its thrashing death throes, the scourge which had so recently stomped peasants or scorched Tokyo becomes strangely noble, tragic.

So why, as it slips down the drain of political relevance, does this phenomenon not grace the fading Republican Party?

Could it be the comic, slapstick nature of its frothy desperation?

It just hasn't been the best of years for the GOP. The once-formidable elephant, so spiteful and threatening, now seems a leftover Easter Bunny, dead of battery, bereft of ideas.

Republicans know it, and you can see the fear in their eyes, the bobbling adam's apple gulping for air in their throat. When the panic erupts, it's... funny.

That wild-eyed, drunk-in-the-gutter chattering and flailing reached a low-point this week, when Long John Boehner attempted to franchise for his party the unfortunately named "Teabagger" uprising. One of the biggest fumbles by the poorly attended insurrection Wednesday was that very choice of shorthand term for all the "populist" surliness, and MSNBC pundits have had a field day with the double entendre labelling this cheap-seat "movement" - although the strunky David Schuster's chortle about "full-throated teabaggin'" put me off my feed a little.

Better this Twitter dissent had checked out the Urban Dictionary, where:

Teabagging, n., Insertion of scrotal sac into another person's mouth in the fashion of a teabag into a mug, with an up/down (in/out) motion.

Well... sometimes you feel like a nut. Sometimes you don't. Last week, it seems, we didn't. Actor/activist Janene Garofalo noted the crowds were "in the tens".

(Hate to quote Garofalo, however, since she's such a recruiting incentive for the nutball Right. This absurdly tendentious woman paints every issue with the broadest possible brush. Assured of her own feathery genius, she yammers the bygone Left's tattered meme that those who disagree with her astringent, unworkable worldview are collectively, gasp!, racists.)

Sure, the 'baggers wanted to conjure up images of the Boston Tea Party on the eve of the American Revolution, when, as accounts would have it, just-folks colonists rose up to protest unfair taxation by dumping British tea into Boston harbor.

Despite the cheerleading of Fox News and the exhortations of rain-soaked patriots in Washington, D.C., most Americans decided to stay indoors and finish their 1040s... or... graft daisy buds on periwinkle stems. Watch apple slices turn brown. Something, anything other than throw away their time on a nebulous, poorly conceived revolt against... what? Taxes? Death? Any of the other certainties ravaging our frail jogs through life?

This follows by only a few weeks the release of the Republican Congressional "anti-budget" that was as formidable as a comic book and as predictable as a Mexican dog race. OK... let's see. Cut taxes. Right. Cut spending. Check.

I'm shocked, shocked at the freshness and bold, maverick nature of these conservative ideas!

The party must have realized they were in deep s**t when even Fox News remarked on the high quality of the folder binding for this "budget plan", trying hard to dig out some talking point from the dog-and-pony show.

Now we have one genius talking up the idea of a bank run to solve our insolvency, and Gov. Rick Perry in Texas eyeballing secession to cut loose the Lone Star state from the decaying Union. Don't these Southern guys every learn? (And, yeah, what the f**k is it with his hair? In an interview, I thought he had some kind of Fess Parker, coonskin-cap bulls**t going on.)

I'm sorry: Bank run. Wow. Mr. Burr! That's as good as you got? Yeah. Soak that ATM, bitch!

It couldn't have been a coincidence that Sarah Palin dug herself out of hibernation and swooped down to what she charmingly calls "the lower 48" for a whirlwind of whistlestop speeches on the rubber-chicken circuit. Since the election, she's never really gone away - we couldn't get that lucky - although her misadventures largely have been confined to gossip tabloid chatter about her daughter's love life.

As Politico noted of her appearance at an Indiana anti-abortion group's dinner (take that for your extremist-baiting, DHS):

"I think she is a standard-bearer right now," (beleagured GOP chairman Michael) Steele said. "She and Mitt Romney and Gov. Pawlenty, Gov. Sanford, Rudy Giuliani, Eric Cantor, Mike Pence. We have a significant number of men and women in our party who are in a very good position right now to carry forward the standard of the GOP."

Upon taking the stage, Palin criticized President Barack Obama's position on abortion and stem cell research. She chided the president's campaign trail response to a question from Pastor Rick Warren about when life begins, saying that the answer was not above her pay grade.

Ooo! Tight! 'Course, this comes in a week that has seen the Alaska governor absorb some setbacks: Her nominee for state attorney general was a thumbs-down in the legislature - first time that's happened. And remember her running mate from last year? On a talk show, John McCain snubbed her in his list of promising GOP governors worth grooming for Pennsylvania Avenue; funny, he ticked off the names of most of the others on Steele's roster.

Sarah Palin's bad timing: She came along at a time when American's are sick of empty, figurehead Presidents, of month-long vacations down at the ranch. They've had it with do-nothing, absentee jackasses like Bush. She epitomizes the ideal candidate of the latter-day GOP: A vivid shell, well-groomed and personable, who can be molded like wet clay into the presentable façade behind which aberrant policymakers drop the cheery bulls**t and loot at will.

As Raymond Leon Roker noted during last year's Vice Presidendial debate:

Her lack of command over any nuanced facts was irrelevant, so long as she strung sentences together in some form of policy haiku. Palin was clearly reading prepared text and we were treated to a nationally broadcast recital of everything she learned over the past five weeks (or five days). There were times when her facial expressions were pure animatronics, as she spit out answers that would have had Couric or Gibson falling out of her chairs.

We know she was a local newscaster in Alaska, we know she plays the flute (toots it good, teabaggers!), and even did so in a beauty contest. We know there was a time when she looked damn fine in a swimsuit. And we know she was the mayor of a tiny town in the great North ravaged by a burgeoning meth-industry problem during her tenure. Seems there was a volatile drug lab bubbling up speed just about everywhere but the always-full newspaper rackStash in Palin's den.

Trouble is, these days all the GOP's putty is getting hurled on the wall - just to see what sticks. The Republicans are adrift, fresh out of ideas and relying on a still-formidable, sympathetic American media to prop them up. This is, after all, primarily designed to be the party of rich people, and not too many po' folk own radio stations, newspapers, and television networks, nor do they publish big, glossy magazines with some flavor-of-the-month movie star - or politician - on the cover.

Sure. The party still gets good press, even if only to the extent GOP policies are taken seriously. And that undo attention is becoming... noticeable.

The party's puppets, the underachieving hairdos ready to front any deep-pockets scam, are out of fashion.

Looks like you've Hoover'd yourselves again, Grand Ol' Party.