With President Obama’s 100th day in office rapidly approaching, there will be a raft of stories enumerating, dissecting, and otherwise catalogging his accomplishments during the FDR-inspired timeframe.  The best of these can, without a doubt, be found here.  For rabid Obama-haters, try this one.

But what about the Grand Old Party?  How have the Republicans fared during this micro-centennial?  What have they accomplished since Barack Obama took office?

It is tempting to sum it up using some combination of the letters N and O, but really, they’ve done so much less than nothing.

Their signature legislative accomplishment was their near-unanimous rejection of the President’s stimulus bill, one which they lopped $150 billion off of, despite the fact that most economists said it needed to be larger.  The silver lining here was that the American people no longer had to wonder which side was playing politics with their economic safety.  The GOP bragged about it.

They also opposed the President’s budget, and submitted the political equivalent of macaroni art in the form of their own budget plan.  Now, they’re hoping the Democrats don’t use that “nuclear option,” which they were so hot for a couple of years ago, to finalize the budget.

Politically, they did considerably worse.  First, there was a pitched battle for chairmanship of the RNC, in which several leading Republicans like Chip Saltsman and Caton Dawson were just plain taken out.  The result was a victory for Michael Steele, a guy who couldn’t stay on message if he had a GPS and an OnStar operator to guide him.  Not that it mattered, because nobody listens to him.

The Republicans also set about trying to destroy the 2 best things they had going for them, Sarah Palin and Meghan McCain.

Sarah Palin is the GOP’s only rock star, a politician capable of energizing the base and attracting at least some new voters, but conservative leaders, from Newt Gingrich to John McCain, and even Fox News, have been trying to convince the world that Palin is done.

Meghan McCain, on the other hand, is the GOP pop star, an attractive and refreshing alternative to gargoyles like Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove.  She’s the only Republican who can attract voters who shrug quizzically when they hear the phrase “Don’t touch that dial.”  Yet the conservative blogosphere has unleashed the hounds on her, trashing her every chance they get.

They have also elevated trivialities, like the President’s dress code, TelePrompTer use, even his pizza-ordering procedures, while trivializing life-and-death decisions, like the Somali pirate crisis, into political point-scoring opportunities.

On the activist front, conservatives pushed so hard against gay marriage that they have caused a near-tipping-point in favor of gay marriage.  They also formed a “populist” Tea Party Movement born of rich commodities traders mocking “loser” homeowners, then gave it a pornographic nickname that caused it to be justly, if gratuitously, mocked.

Now, they have cycled through all of their ideas so quickly that they are now back to being led by Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and “I Love the 90′s” panelist Newt Gingrich.
Hopefully, by the end of the next 100 days, they will have moved past being the party of TelePrompTers, Tea Bags, and Torture.

Oh, they did manage to do one thing right: They donated Sarah Palin’s wardrobe to charity.  You gotta start somewhere.