So this morning, while on Twitter making fun of Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele and his almost-too-laughably-stereotypical-to-be-true decision to call his new blog "What Up?," I noticed that the RNC's website had taken the clever step of superimposing people's faces over the "O" in "GOP." Gives it that "real person" vibe and all that, see?
Some examples and the mistake you came here to see below the fold....
Sometimes it's regular folks, which they call "Faces," like the ones shown in this little collage I put together:

And sometimes it's "GOP Heroes," historical figures who were Republicans, like former U.S. Sen. Edward Brooke (R-Mass.), American Red Cross founder Clara Barton, and famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass (top to bottom):

But the very first person I saw when I clicked onto the RNC site was this man:

Now it just so happens that I'm a bit of an American history buff. And I thought this "Hiram Rhodes," pictured above, looked familiar. Well, it also just so happens that I'm presently reading a book by Philip Dray called Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen (New York, Houghton Mifflin Co., 2008). And Chapter 4 of that book, called "The Whirligig of Time," deals almost entirely with the great historical feat in 1870 of a black man, a Republican, claiming the U.S. Senate seat from Mississippi that previously had been held by none other than Jefferson Davis.
That man was Hiram Revels. Hiram Rhodes Revels.
The modern-day Republican Party -- the lineal (but hardly ideological) successors to Hiram Revels' party -- forgot to include his last name. I didn't change it or doctor it in any way. If you're quick, you can go see for yourself (although you might have to F5 it a few times to get Revels' picture) before someone with the GOP figures this out (if they ever do).
What an embarrassment. Even when the GOP tries to do something relatively docile, they can't help but screw it up. They're not just the "Party of No," they're the Party of No Competence.
(cross-posted in substantial part at Blast Off!)