Sutton and Brodkorb recently were the Republicans' dynamic duo. Batman and Robin (debate which was which). Now Sutton appears as broke as the party was in the way he left it, and Brodkorb's firing by Republican legislative operatives is costing all of us a bundle. "There they go again," as the Gipper used to say.

Strib reporting, here and here.

BATMAN. (photo credit)

____________UPDATE_____________
Some people hit hard times and it is polite and deferential to not show Shadenfreude. However, Sutton; Brodkorb; those are horses of a different color, Tevlin of Strib in an OpEd following Strib's initial report having said it well:

There have been few political operatives as combative and ornery as Tony Sutton. He eviscerated political opponents and lambasted those in his own party who didn’t follow every line of the party script. He once called major donors to the Republican Party “quislings,” a reference to World War II traitors.

In many ways, Sutton became a caricature of himself, a localized version of Karl Rove or James Carville. For a City Pages profile, Sutton posed with a baseball bat. It was an image he relished, the tough guy who liked to tell everybody to suck it up and take responsibility.

Sometimes it takes a hard fall to humanize somebody. Whether it will also humble Sutton is hard to say. As reported Monday, Sutton has filed for personal bankruptcy, owing creditors more than $2 million. This comes after running his party into a $2 million hole.

My gut instinct is to have sympathy for Sutton and certainly for his family. He is likely a guy in a lot of pain right now. If he’s like most people who get into a bad place, it’s partly self-inflicted and partly circumstantial.

But as the top spokesman for the Minnesota Republican Party for several years, Sutton was the voice of its philosophy. That philosophy is contained in scores of Sutton’s rants over the years. If you search the newspaper database for the words “Sutton” and “financial responsibility,” you get scores of references. If you search Sutton and “compassion,” you get zero.

Tevlin also noted:

In going after Tim Walz, Sutton once remarked: “We’re going to wrap the [healthcare reform] public option around his neck.”

One wonders whether Sutton wouldn’t mind a little of that public option now. The court filing shows he has no health care. Not coincidentally, he also owed money to several hospitals, including Abbott Northwestern and Children’s Hospital. Now, Sutton will wrap his lack of responsibility for his own health care around the necks of the hospitals and those of us who pay for insurance.

And that as much as anything else about the Sutton family is why Schadenfreude is okay for bast confrontational gentlemen. This Google. Nick Coleman commentary.

___________FURTHER UPDATE____________
Sutton family, here and here. Brodkorb's cash drain on your pocket - because of how other Republicans torpedoed this suing Republican, see, e.g., here. There's more. Here.