THE CRAZY ONES.

"Conservatives defeat onetime ally," NPR says of Renee Ellmer's GOP primary loss in North Carolina, and you have to wonder why. Looking at her voting record, she seems as wingnutty as a wingnut could hope for. Look at her dossier at Votesmart. This alone tells a lot:

Renee Ellmers was rated 18% by American Federation of Government Employees (Positions)
Renee Ellmers was rated 90% by Associated General Contractors of America (Positions (Lifetime))

Bad gummint workers disapprove: Republican contributors who siphon money from the gummint into townhouses in McLean, Virginia so it'll be more free-market-like, thumbs up! (UPDATE: Turns out the AGC isn't government contractors after all; it's construction contractors. My bad!) And Ellmers reliably votes for rightwing stuff like Repeal-Obamacare and Stop-Iran-Deal bills. She almost always votes with the Republican majority in the House.

So why did she have to go? Some people say it had to do with Trump, who supported her, but check what bigtime conservative factota who pretend issues matter have to say. Veronique de Rugy at National Review lists a couple of conservatives who blame her support of the Ex-Im Bank, then says, "To be fair, Ellmers wasn’t alone within the GOP in supporting many of these misguided policies" -- which is hilarious, as the vote to extend the Bank's charter passed the House 313-118, with puh-lenty of Republican co-sponsors. Money talks, bullshit walks.

Tim Carney at the Washington Examiner:

While her Chamber of Commerce score was 90 percent, her Club for Growth score was 57 percent.

People who actually need to make money backed her; people who worship capitalism as an unquestionable creatively-destructive god opposed her. Also:

The pro-life Susan B. Anthony List spent five figures against her and knocked on more than 12,000 doors...

Here's the Susan B. Anthony List press-release where Carney got this from. Though Ellmers has a near-impeccable anti-abortion voting record, she and several other female Republican House members got cold feet in January 2015 at the ludicrous "Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act" -- which according to the Washington Post would have nationally banned all abortions after 20 weeks, at least until the Supreme Court inevitably threw it out -- and swapped in "a bill prohibiting federal funding for abortions."

Not good enough. If you're a woman in the Party of Santorum, you make your bones by agreeing to any indignity against women weaker than yourself they ask you to endorse -- and you have to do it every time they tell you.

I hear a lot from major conservative thinkers about how abortion is the Democrats' "sacrament" but note that a female Congressperson who was willing to embarrass herself by voting for every ridiculous We'll-Show-That-Obama bill couldn't get away with the slightest deviation from anti-abortion orthodoxy without getting the Kiss of Death.

There's a lot of stuff in the press about the "Bernie Bros" and the alleged infighting on the Left over our presumptive nominee. But, as Ellmers' sad case shows, there is nothing on our side that is remotely as weird and Stalinist as what goes on among the Republicans.

UPDATE. Oh, speaking of women's issues and the GOP, NR's Mona Charen on the Stanford rape case:

Here is the truth that the Left will never acknowledge — the hook-up culture they celebrate and defend is the greatest petri dish for enabling rape and sexual assault imaginable. It does women no favors to tell them that the way they drink is irrelevant. It may not be a crime to get blind drunk at a bar or party — but it’s reckless. The Stanford woman’s blood-alcohol level was three times the legal limit. Again, that doesn’t make her a criminal, but who can doubt that, but for that, she would not have become a victim?

This is what they say out loud to people as the Democrats prepare to nominate their first female Presidential candidate. They're not just a danger to others -- they're also a danger to themselves.