New York's Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino is getting low marks in the media after making incendiary comments that children shouldn't be brainwashed into seeing homosexuality as a valid choice, that homosexuals are "dysfunctional" and other unsavory things.

He's now making the rounds of the morning shows, saying he's "not a homophobic" (not a grammarian either, apparently), that his beloved and highly "functional" nephew is gay and that he never said most of the things attributed to him—he's only against marriage equality because he's Catholic.

Apparently, this lunatic is claiming that those remarks were a part of a speech suggested to him by his ultra-Orthodox Jewish hosts, and that he never said them. But...does he really show up and just read speeches that are handed to him? Because this text was made available to the press, so it seems clear he had intended to say it all. Could someone who hopes to be governor of New York possibly have read the prepared text cold, with no approval, and skipped over the parts even he realized wouldn't go down well in his state?

What saddens me most about this and what angers me most is that someone this crazy—and he is crazy, for this and many other reasons—could be the Republican standard-bearer for NEW YORK. He is three weeks away from having a shot at the governor's mansion. (He has no chance, and yet...what if something unexpected happens to Cuomo and he pulls out, etc.?)

I see Paladino as comparable to Christine O'Donnell and Rand Paul and Joe Miller and Sharron Angle—it's very interesting seeing which states (and which dynamics within those states) will allow flat-out batshit-crazy people into the Senate or into the governor's mansion. I realize there are plenty of far-right wing people I don't agree with in elected office already, but I'm not sure I can look at people with whom I almost totally disagree—Jim DeMint, Saxby Chambliss, the list goes on—and seriously put them alongside these teabagger zealots.

The silver lining of that massive T-storm Dems are facing in early November is that I can't envision any scenario under which these people, those who get in, actually contribute to government successfully and positively; sure, that means we'll have two paralyzingly bad years in the U.S. (yayyyy), but if '10 winds up smacking down Obama (and along with him common sense), '12 almost has to be time for buyer's remorse. Just a hope and a guess.