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.

So did the RNC wise up and decide not to embrace the unhinged, race-baiting Breitbart? No, they just moved the event to September because the big spenders weren’t signing up for the August date. So now the “final event” before the election in California, at which the party will raise its get-out-the-vote campaign money, is scheduled for some time after Labor Day. And Breitbart is totally still invited, if he can fit it into his schedule. Perhaps RNC head Michael Steele can help with Breitbart’s road to redemption, by helping him to understand urban-suburban hip-hop settings.

Let’s hope Breitbart can still make it! I mean the guy is busy — when he’s not screaming about things on Fox, he is screaming about things at “minority-based Tea Party events” he organizes to prove once and for all that the Tea Parties are not even a little bit racist.

(That event, in Philadelphia, went swimmingly. 300 mostly white people showed up and other organizers expressed their discomfort with the presence of the suddenly tarnished Breitbart.)

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.

But two-thirds of the committee’s members would have to vote to fire him. And firing him would be as humiliating for the party as his continued presence. Republicans probably don’t want to oust their only prominent African-American party leader, especially when he barely won the job from a South Carolina pol who belongs to a whites-only country club.

So they have to wait for Steele to resign. And I think they’ll be waiting for a long time.

Update: Well, they’ll be waiting until January, at least, when Steele’s term is up.

Yes, it’s hard not to resist the siren song of sweet, sweet schadenfreude. The Michael Steel Comedy hour, after all, is (was?) one of the few sideshows in Washington politics one could enjoy guilt-free. His misadventures, unlike those of, say, John Boehner, do not have real-world policy consequences. And for liberals, Steele’s Michael Scott-esque ability to say exactly the wrong thing with astonishing frequency was a nice exception to the “Republicans have ironclad message control and Democrats have Joe Lieberman” rule.

No wonder, then, that Republicans have seized the opportunity to try and force Steele out for good; his high-profile humiliations are matched only by the RNC’s incompetent fundraising under his tenure. Despite all of this, Steele was nearly invincible until now, insulated both by RNC bylaws and optics (imagine what a public relations nightmare it would be if the GOP—long haunted by its troubled relationship with white identity politics—forced out one of its few prominent black members, who they appointed primarily to distance themselves from that troubled relationship).

Barring acts of God—or, perhaps, a sex scandal—the only recourse available to the rest of the party was to wait for Steele to say something so repugnant that they could plausibly demand his resignation en masse without leaving any room to interpret this demand as a race thing. Keep in mind that Republicans could not turn on Steele over just any controversial remarks; it would be hard for him to utter a sentence more offensive to our critical faculties and basic human decency than what you hear excreted by Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh on a regular basis, and yet the party continues to embrace them both. If the GOP turned on their chairman for the same infractions they made excuses for—and even celebrated—elsewhere, they risked looking like hypocrites, or even alienating their base.

Lucky for them, Steele provided one shining, golden opportunity. He committed the one act the Republican Party finds more vile than consensual gay sex: he unintentionally offered some mild criticism of his party’s own platform.

How deliciously, tragically ironic that Steele made this fatal stumble in doing exactly what the RNC appointed him to do. Forget policy, consistency, or coherence; a good chunk of his job description is attacking President Obama at every available opportunity, and his condemnation of the war in Afghanistan was little more than a pretense under which to do just that. Sadly, when he assumed that the party’s blind hatred of the president would win out over their blind embrace of military conflict in all its myriad forms, he grievously miscalculated.

But if Michael Steele’s reign of error comes to a characteristically ignominious end, that will be far from the greatest pity in this whole fiasco. The far sadder story is the narrowing this represents in mainstream debate over Afghanistan, as the leadership of both major parties concludes that the only acceptable position to take is a stalwartly pro-war one. It’s one thing to watch John McCain reflexively support American military involvement with every country whose name he can correctly pronounce; it’s quite another to see the DNC simultaneously embrace over-heated anti-dissent rhetoric that sounds like it was pilfered verbatim from a Karl Rove-authored internal White House memo circa 2003.

I am not taking a position on the merits of Steele’s claims; assessing the goals and current status of our efforts in Afghanistan is, as Todd Gitlin points out, a mind-bogglingly complex endeavor, and I don’t have the expertise for it. But opposition to the war is not a fringe position, and at least one highly respected foreign policy expert — Steve Clemons — has stepped up to defend Steele’s remarks. It appears that in the case of every liberal’s favorite RNC chair, even a stopped clock occasionally says something mildly plausible.

But that clearly isn’t how the vast majority of elected officials on either side of the aisle see it. And so, rather than having a deeply needed debate over the merits of our mission in Afghanistan, they continue to behave as if there is no debate to be had.

“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.”

Graham, R-S.C., described himself as “dismayed, angry and upset. It was an uninformed, unnecessary, unwise, untimely comment.”

He told CBS’ “Face the Nation” that “this is not President Obama’s war. This is American’s war. We need to stand behind the president.”

Asked whether Steele should quit, Graham said, “It’s up to him to see if he can lead the Republican Party. It couldn’t have come at a worst time.”

At the fundraiser, Steele said, “This was a war of Obama’s choosing. This is not something the United States has actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in.

“If he’s such a student of history, has he not understood that, you know, that’s the one thing you don’t do is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? All right? Because everyone who’s tried, over a thousand years of history, has failed,” Steele said. “And there are reasons for that. There are other ways to engage in Afghanistan.”