Credit where credit is due: the Tea Party’s crop of malevolent clowns makes Stephen King wet with envy.

There’s Nevada’s Sharron Angle, the candidate who thinks reporters should only ask questions that she likes,  also enjoys using death metaphors when describing her opponent.

Colorado boasts Ken Buck, who believes that incest and rape are piss-poor excuses for getting an abortion.

Rand Paul, or “The Mouth that Couldn’t Talk Straight”, embarrasses Kentucky with collegiate tales of Aqua Buddha and an incomprehensible economic vision for the country.

Joe “Neckbeard” Miller, a carpetbagger from Kansas, won Teabagger Doyenne Sarah Palin’s heart, even as he called for cutting off farmers subsidies to Alaska. In addition to the typical Teabagger list of grievances against the federal government, he’s also a hardcore Tenther.

And then there’s the Homecoming Princess of WTF-ery: Christine O’Donnell. Lies! Witchcraft! Bloody altars! Masturbation! Bowling! And today, a call by CREW for a criminal investigation into Ms. O’Donnell’s slippery campaign finances. Sarah Palin must be so proud of her mini-me.

Save, perhaps, for Ms. O’Donnell, though, none of this batshit insanity can hold a candle, satanic ritual or otherwise, to Carl Paladino. The self-identified “angry” Mr. Paladino is the Tea Party’s candidate for governor –and an aneurysm — in New York. A real charmer, Carl can lay claim to being a racist (even if Thurman Thomas says otherwise), a sexist, a homophobe, and a bestiality fetishist. He sends out mailers in Smell-o-Vision to show how much he thinks government stinks. He disseminates angry emails questioning the size of opponent Andrew Cuomo’s testicles.

Paladino the Vulgar bested the comparatively milquetoast, perennial Republican loser Rick Lazio in the primaries, who had some remarkably accurate words about Carl Paladino:

“It’s such a bizarre year and such a bizarre time, and, let’s face it, Carl Paladino is one sentence from dropping the N-word at any moment.”

Paladino is also stinking filthy rich. In fact, he’s so wealthy, he’s self-financing his bizarro world campaign, which I suppose, allows him to do an end run around the whole “campaign finance” problem facing Chastity Queen O’Donnell.  In fact, Paladino falls into the category of, in the words of The One Who Is Shrill, the “angry rich“.

Yet if you want to find real political rage — the kind of rage that makes people compare President Obama to Hitler, or accuse him of treason — you won’t find it among these suffering Americans. You’ll find it instead among the very privileged, people who don’t have to worry about losing their jobs, their homes, or their health insurance, but who are outraged, outraged, at the thought of paying modestly higher taxes.

Great. So he’s the best of both worlds.

It makes me long for the days of the preening Harold Ford and idiots who wanted to barter chickens for medical care. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a bicycle horn that needs honking. . . if that’s okay with you, Ms. O’Donnell.