Normally, as Election Day grows closer, the inflammatory political rhetoric increases as the candidates and their proxies duke it out for votes. Normally.

We left Normally somewhere around January 2009.

Instead, as the clock ticks off the minutes until polls close across the country on November 2nd, I wonder if we are witness to the spectacle of a real-time meltdown of the GOP-infused Tea Party (and its spokesgrifter-in-chief, Sarah Palin). Is this a case of familiarity breeding contempt?

Let’s take a look. Today, Palin launched another Tea Party Express bus tour meant to close the enthusiasm gap within the Teabagger faction of the Republican party, this time in Reno, Nevada.

Former Alaska governor and Tea Party favorite Sarah Palin kicked off a Tea Party Express bus tour on Monday with a plea for Republicans to “man up” and support the movement.

At the kickoff for the previous bus tour, in Searchlight, Nevada, the media had estimated the crowd there to see Palin in the thousands. This time around, the crowd was estimated at anywhere between 200 and 500 people.

People not so enamored with the former half-term governor of Alaska these days, perhaps? When asked about the Tea Party and Palin, former Minnesota governor (and a 9/11 conspiracy loon in his own right) Jesse Ventura gave her the chair:

“I felt she was completely unqualified. I had more qualifications than she did. I had served as a mayor of a town [Brooklyn Park, Minn.] of 60,000 – hers [Wasilla, Alaska] was 10,000. I had served as governor for two years when everybody wanted me to run for president in 2000, and I said I’m not prepared to be the president. I haven’t even completed office as a governor yet. Now, she never completed her office as governor. She didn’t even get two years in hardly! And she quit to get money. Jesus, how do people not see that! She saw greener pastures, said, Screw the people of Alaska, and went on to collect.

It’s not just Palin who’s losing her luster.

Christine O’Donnell: the Sarah Palin homunculus and not-a-witch Senate candidate in Delaware who brought a bendy straw to a gunfight for her first debate against opponent Chris Coons? Unable to name a single Supreme Court case she disagreed with, she even asked the debate moderator for a lifeline. O’Donnell spent an awful lot of time tweeting directly afterward about how the poll numbers shot up the Y axis after her high school-grade performance. Except they haven’t. She is relying on the Palin playbook: avoid the press, avoid tough questions, and tweet your jabs at your opponent. Maybe no one will notice. Coons leads her by double digits.

In New York, teabagger/adulterer/bestiality porn afficionado/racist/homophobic gay bar landlord Carl Paladino, whose expletive-laced, misogynistic vitriol normally would only appeal to the very narrow audience of tax-hating wife-beating rednecks in the state, rocketed out of Buffalo and onto the national stage. Once the audience got to know him a little better, his “tough, shoot-from-the-hip” talk no longer amused. Now he now trails frontrunner Andrew Cuomo by 35 points in the race for Governor. [After tonight's debate, who knows?]

Sharron Angle, Sarah Palin-endorsed teabagger candidate for the U.S. Senate out in Nevada, who has been certifiable from the get-go, stepped it up this past weekend. After asserting that most illegal immigrants cross the border from Canadaria, she took questions from Latino students who questioned her on the brown-skinned people in her ad on illegal immigration.

“So that’s what we want is a secure and sovereign nation, and, you know, I don’t know that all of you are Latino. Some of you look a little more Asian to me. I don’t know that,” Angle said, according to video posted by the Nevada paper. “What we know, what we know about ourselves is that we are a melting pot in this country.”

Even after the coma-inducing debate the other night, Angle currently leads Harry Reid by a mere 2 points, so it’s anybody’s guess at this point. She could very well be done in by the OTHER Teabagger candidate in the race, Scott Ashjian.

Joe Miller, another Palin-supported teabagger whose star is fading, didn’t just bring the crazy this weekend. At a town hall held in a public school, Miller asserted that the Berlin Wall served as a good example when it came to immigration reform. When a nosy reporter wanted to ask him more questions, he brought the Stasi:

[Alaska Dispatch editor] Hopfinger, who had learned at the last minute of Miller’s planned appearance at the public school, ducked into a hallway after the meeting to pose his own questions to Miller.

Hopfinger had been trying to ask Miller questions when two or three guards told him to leave or risk being charged with trespassing.

When Hopfinger continued to try to ask questions, one of the guards put the reporter in an arm-bar and then handcuffed him.

Trespassing on public property? False arrest? Not such a good move for Miller’s campaign, as sitting Senator Lisa Murkowski, the write-in Republican candidate, is now pretty much tied with him in the polls.

Speaking of Gestapo tactics, Rich Iott, the Teabagger candidate and Nazi cross-dresser, is hurt — HURT — that Republicans would scrub him from their “Young Guns” site after they discovered he enjoys dressing up as a member of one of the most heinous Nazi army divisions of WWII and reenacting its battles with the Soviets. His popularity with potential voters has spiraled out of control faster than a smoking, one-winged Messerschmitt.

I guess this is what happens when you run crazy people for national office. Let that be a lesson to us all.