Well, first came an action/ And then a reaction/ But you can't switch around/ For your own satisfaction/ Well, you put my house down, then got mad/ At my reaction

Very cool. I mean, it kind of makes Jack White's lyrics sound like something out of a Seattle poetry slam, but it was definitely better than the congresswoman's first choice for a song. (It was Rebecca Black's "Friday.")

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Steele, fresh off his defeat in the election for RNC chair last month, was feeling relaxed. (Even as revelations of mismangement during his tenure continue to emerge.)

TPM's Evan McMorris-Santoro asked Steele, "who do you want to see out there at CPAC?" To which Steele replied, with a grin: "I have no one in particular."

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Skip straight to 2:00 in. You will not regret it.

This guy is Wisconsin Republican Party head Reince Priebus, who is apparently a front-runner for the chairmanship even though he was, according to the New York Times, "once part of Mr. Steele's inner circle," which means he was probably complicit in all the money-wasting and so forth.

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Not Michael Steele, apparently. Tonight, the embattled RNC chairman will announce his decision on a re-election bid, and all signs point to his stepping aside.

On Saturday night, Steele sent an email to committee members, inviting them to join him for a private conference call at 7:30 tonight:

"Dear Members, Please join me for a private conference call, Monday December 13th at 7:30pm (EST). For your personal conference code please RSPV to ... Thank you, and I look forward to talking to you Monday evening. Michael."

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More than four dozen interviews with members of the 168-member central committee found fear that a badly damaged Steele could emerge from the wreckage of a knockdown, drag-out fight to head the party as it challenges President Barack Obama in 2012. While most agree that Steele's time has been rough -- and costly -- the members also recognize that a leadership fight could overshadow gains that Republicans made in the midterm elections.

With balloting set to take place in just two months, many just want Steele to go.

"You can't keep spending the kind of money they're spending every month just to operate the RNC," said committee member Ada Fisher of North Carolina. "I would hope he would step aside."

"The question is who should be hired for the next two years, It's not a matter of firing anybody," said James Bopp, a committee member from Indiana who holds great sway among social conservatives on the panel. "I just don't think Steele has performed at the level we need for the presidential cycle."

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Speaking Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said that on issues ranging from the economy to health care to the environment, the GOP has made its positions clear.

But, he says, ideas put on the table by Republicans have been "summarily rejected" by the Democrats.

Steele says that GOP leaders "couldn't even get a meeting with the president."

Steele says he thinks voters are tired of the way Democrats, who control the White House and Congress, are running the federal government.

He predicts an "unprecedented wave" of voter dissatisfaction will give his party control of the House, and possibly the Senate, after next month's midterm elections.

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There was speculation, initially, that the event was canceled due to the recent incident in which Mr. Breitbart smeared an honorable public servant named Shirley Sherrod, by posting a misleadingly edited video clip and falsely accusing her of racism against some  white people whose farm she saved, many years ago.

Ms. Sherrod was promptly fired, because the administration was worried that Glenn Beck would call her a racist. She is suing Breitbart, who was roundly and finally called a bullshit artist by the members of the press that he professes to be warring with but with whom he is actually in a parasitic relationship.

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If firing him were easy, he would've been gone months ago. Steele took money for speaking gigs, made media rounds promoting a book he never told anyone he was even writing, scared off fundraisers, and presided over a humiliating expenses scandal that got the words "Michael Steele lesbian bondage club" repeated on every major network for a good week.

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“It helps me understand my position on the chess board,” he told CNN. “It helps me understand, you know, where the enemy camp is and where those who are inside the tent are.”

In other words, Steele would have us believe he was playing eleven-dimensional chess all along. Such a claim was always transparently ridiculous, but it seems even more so in hindsight; whatever game he was playing might be more closely likened to Russian roulette. Solo Russian roulette. Now, as he faces an insurrection within the GOP over his anti-Afghanistan War remarks, it appears he finally discovered a live round in the chamber.

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Neither GOP lawmaker, however, was outraged enough to demand Steele's resignation, as some other Republican have done. Both said from Kabul it was up to Steele to decide whether he could continue to lead the party.

Steele's remarks, a political gift to Democrats in a congressional election year, were captured Thursday on camera, during a Connecticut fundraiser that was closed to the news media, and posted online. The comments would make it difficult for Republican candidates to have Steele campaign for them.

"I think those statements are wildly inaccurate and there's no excuse for them," McCain said, adding that Steele sent the Arizona senator an e-mail saying the remarks "were misconstrued."

"I believe we have to win here. I believe in freedom. But the fact is that I think that Mr. Steele is going to have to assess as to whether he can still lead the Republican Party as chairman of the Republican National Committee and make an appropriate decision," McCain told ABC's "This Week."

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The latest Steele gaffe, you might have heard by now, involves the war in Afghanistan. In an amateur video posted on YouTube, the RNC chairman calls it "a war of Obama's choosing" and "not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in." (Apparently, Steele wasn't paying attention to the news back in, say, October 2001.) He also says that history has shown that "the one thing you don't do is engage in a land war in Afghanistan."

And now Kristol has posted a plea at the Weekly Standard for Steele to step down:

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Early Monday -- as you may have seen elsewhere -- RNC chairman Michael Steele put out a statement attacking Kagan for quoting Justice Thurgood Marshall's criticism of the Constitution. "Given Kagan’s... support for statements suggesting that the Constitution as originally drafted and conceived, was 'defective,' you can expect Senate Republicans to respectfully raise serious and tough questions to ensure the American people can thoroughly and thoughtfully examine Kagan’s qualifications and legal philosophy before she is confirmed to a lifetime appointment," Steele said (as if Senate Republicans would listen to him before deciding what questions to raise, serious, tough or otherwise). Not long afterwards, the RNC put out a research memo raising what were intended to be alarming questions about her. From the memo:

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The ballroom was about half-empty for Steele's address, the final speech of the weekend. Turns out the Republican National Committee chairman wasn't exactly a big draw (though the press rows were full, and cameras were rolling). The crowd had been thinning out all afternoon, though; people didn't seem to leave because Steele was speaking, but they also didn't seem to come back in for him.

After a tumultuous past few weeks, Steele hinted at an apology for the problems the RNC has had under his reign. "In life, you realize very quickly that you can't please everyone, but you can certainly make them all mad at you at the same time," he said. "And that is a lesson well learned."

But it turned out he was really talking about the Republican Party. "Folks have been mad at us in the past, and we have learned from that past," he said. "And we're now ready to move on into a brighter future, as leaders, as Republicans, as conservatives."

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The buzz has been building on cable news that Steele might be forced out of his job as Republican National Committee chairman any minute. And yes, there are a few obvious reasons why Steele isn't any Republican's favorite Republican these days (though he's clearly the Democratic National Committee's favorite punching bag): the money spent on "bondage-themed nightclub" Voyeur West Hollywood; the insistence that the trouble he's in is because of his race; the forced ouster of the RNC's chief of staff; the general inability to keep himself out of the news.

But Republicans in Washington and outside the Beltway say Steele's still probably safe. "RNC members are busy," former South Carolina GOP chairman Katon Dawson -- whom Steele defeated after six rounds of voting -- told Salon Wednesday evening. "They've got their own elections right now -- they've got primaries -- the last thing they want to worry about is Washington." Dawson says there might be some people who want Steele's job, but "I'm not one of them." "I don't think you could get a quorum to come to Washington right now" to vote Steele out and hand the gig to someone else, Dawson says.

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The resignation is effective immediately, the RNC announced. Mike Leavitt, who worked on Sen. John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign and has been the party's deputy chief of staff, will be replacing him.

This move comes in the wake of revelations that the RNC allowed a staffer to expense the cost of taking potential donors to a Los Angeles nightclub that often features topless women, with a bondage theme. That news had only sharpened the criticism Steele has faced over the organization's spending during his tenure, and increased the pressure on him to do something about it. It appears this resignation is both an attempt to show something is being done and to throw McKay under the proverbial bus.

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Just after the RNC fired a low-level staffer for setting up a young donors event at Voyeur West Hollywood, it seems the GOP accidentally sent out a mailer asking for money with a phone number that directed loyal Republicans to... a phone sex hotline.

The mailer printed the RNC's phone number -- 202-863-8500 -- as an 800 number instead of a 202 one. "Get together with exciting people everywhere," a message at the 800-863-8500 line answers. It redirects callers to another number, which tells "sexy guys" to "get ready for a new way to go live, one on one, with hot horny girls waiting right now to talk to you." (The girls are "students, housewives and working girls," and before calling, you should "lie back, baby, relax," but you also need to have your credit card ready, because calling the actual sex line -- which requires yet a third number -- will cost you $2.99 a minute.)

Oops.

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Take Michael Steele, current chief of the Republican National Committee. Since almost immediately after he was elected to his position, Steele has been on a job deathwatch. He’s attacked Rush Limbaugh, committed multiple gaffes in public and second-guessed the GOP’s electoral chances. He criticized his own party in his book, which he hadn’t told anyone he was writing, and traveled around the country giving paid speeches -- a totally inappropriate activity for a party chairman. There have also been continuous problems with his management of the staff of the RNC. Most recently, he's gotten in hot water for the party thrown on the RNC's dime at a southern California bondage-themed nightclub.

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That staffer has been identified as Allison Meyers, who was in charge of the RNC's "Young Eagles" program. In that role, Meyers worked on outreach to donors in their 30's and 40's.

The RNC has been circulating an internal memo on the controversy written by Chief of Staff Ken McKay. In it, McKay writes:

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