It’s finally happened. The decades-long ascendancy of the Allen Quist/Jon Grunseth/Tom Emmer social conservative breed of whackaloon has finally done what the DFL alone could never do, and all but destroyed the Republican Party of Minnesota.

We had hints of this earlier this year, when the RPMers managed to ditch incumbent state Senator Paul Koering in the primary. Reason: Koering is gay. However, they may have done so at the cost of a state Senate seat:

After losing Tuesday’s GOP primary, state Sen. Paul Koering has endorsed a successor: DFL candidate Taylor Stevenson.

Koering served two terms as a Republican, but said Wednesday he’s leaving the party after it helped elect former state Rep. Paul Gazelka of Brainerd.

[...]

"The party that I’ve called home for 14 years has kind of, in essence, went off the cliff," Koering said. "I always tried to stay with the party to hopefully be a voice of reason within the party. But I found through this campaign that that doesn’t work anymore."

The primary appears to have vanquished Koering’s appetite for politics; he told the Times his "political days are over."

In stark contrast, the DFL, Minnesota’s version of the national Democratic Party, has had for many years — ever since the tragic gay-bashing death of former state Senator John Chenoweth in August of 1991 — an unofficial policy that gay and lesbian people are welcome to run for office under the DFL banner, but only so long as they are open about their sexuality. At least one prominent figure is rumored to have left the DFL rather than leave the deceptively-comfy confines of the closet.

But this was only a taste of the nutbar-induced meltdown to come.

Seems that, after long decades of traducing at the hands of the extremely nutty SocialCons and Tea-Party-flavored TheoCons, the not-quite-as-nutty Republicans have had E-gosh-darned-Nuff, forsaking SocialTeaPartyCon favorite Tom Emmer in favor of old-school Republican turned Independence Party candidate Tom Horner:

Thirteen former Republican legislators appeared at the Capitol Wednesday to demonstrate their support for Independence Party candidate for governor Tom Horner, describing him as the only candidate with a sensible plan for dealing with the state’s budget woes.

"Tom Horner recognizes this problem," said former state Sen. Bill Belanger, a Republican from Bloomington who said Horner’s proposal to expand the sales tax is the only plan "that will provide stability to the tax system" as income taxes decline with an aging population.

Remember, folks, this guy Horner is still a Republican: He’ll raise and/or create new taxes, but only in the most regressive form of sales tax, one that hits the poor and middle class more than it does the rich. (This is in contrast to Mark Dayton, the Democrat in the race, who will raise taxes on the wealthier folks, the people who have made out like bandits over the past few decades while the rest of us have struggled not to fall backwards.) So it’s not surprising that he’s taking more voters from the hard-core nutbar Republican, Tom Emmer, than he is from Mark Dayton:

“One of the most dramatic findings in the [latest MPR/Humphrey Institute] poll is that Tom Horner is having a terrific impact on Tom Emmer. Tom Emmer is losing 40% of Republicans, which is an unheard of defection,” noted Larry Jacobs, Director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the Humphrey Institute.

“We are finding Horner picking up 22% of the Republican vote. It is about double what he is getting from Democrats. The assumption was that Horner was going to need to draw heavily from Republicans, given the fact that he is a former Republican and that is appearing to start to be working right now,” Jacobs told Kare11 News.

The nutbars left in control of a hollowed-out, nutbar-dominated rump party are totally losing their poo as a result. RPM mouthpiece and deputy chair Michael Brodkorb claimed the Republicans endorsing Horner represent "a by-gone era" and were out of touch with the nutbars’ calls to redesign state government. And his response was downright restrained compared to that of Tom Emmer, or that of Brodkorb’s boss Tony Sutton:

"They’re the people that have gotten us in this bigger government, higher taxes problem, which is probably why they’re supporting the Independent candidate," Emmer said.

Republican Party chairman Tony Sutton took it a step further, dismissing defectors as "a generation of Republicans that were not successful, the permanent minority. There’s a special place in hell for these quislings."

Not to correct Short Pants Tony’s understanding of history, but this "generation of Republicans that were not successful" and who are now endorsing Horner includes Arne Carlson, former Minnesota governor and Republican, and the only reason he became governor in 1990 is because the hardcore nutbar wing’s candidate of the time, Jon Grunseth, got embroiled in a little pool party scandal involving rather young girls. (And in 1994, the nutbar wing, rather than endorse the popular Carlson for re-election, backed the Supreme High Nutbar and Santorumesque Fetus Person, Allen Quist.) But I digress.

Local blogger Two-Putt Tommy also found Sutton’s invective to be bizarrely at variance with reality – and disturbingly typical of the nutbar-dominated RPM of the past three decades, which slimed and hounded longtime Republican and retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Joe Repya out of the RPM for the crime of opposing Ron Carey, who was Sutton’s predecessor as party chair. (The person who accused LTC Repya of being a Communist murderer was rewarded with a plum position in the party.)

Then again, Tony Sutton and the rest of the extreme-nutbar crew have been so insulated from feeling the consequences of their own actions — Sutton’s managed to advance to RPM Chair despite being a failure as RPM treasurer and as a restaurant-chain owner — that they have never learned, or long forgotten, the consequences that await those who feel they can ignore reality indefinitely. Which means they won’t learn the lesson that Tom Horner and Mark Dayton are about to teach them.