I love you, crazy ranting nutcase person.

I love you, crazy ranting nutcase person.

Saints be praised, this guy is amazing. Aficionados of the GOP's new move towards abject batshit insanity have found a new poster boy in inexplicable Virginia lt. gov. nominee E.W. Jackson. He's Allen West, but more prone to irrational fury. He's Louie Gohmert, but more incoherent. He's Steve King and Michele Bachmann, but with the hatefulness dialed up to eleven and a half. How the hell is it that the Republican Party just discovered this loon now? I would have thought they'd have shaken every tree in the conservative nut orchard by now, but no. Here comes a new guy, and he's Akin to be worse. (Get it? Get it? Ha, it's been months since we could use that one.) No, this guy seems to have been specially cloned in a Republican Lunatic Candidate vat, and you don't want to even know what they pump into that thing.

Jackson seems to have no intention of pacing himself, either. Are we really going to have to have a Daily Jackson Roundup? Here's just the stuff brought up recently:

He says that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is just "claiming" to be Mormon. For folks like Reid, he says "they don't believe it or feel it in their hearts." Bonus points to EW for telling this to Glenn Beck, who otherwise would be reduced to interviewing soup cans in his kitchen.

He says that the federal government shouldn't be involved in disaster relief—and that he doesn't think there's "any constitutional authority to do it." Forget budget offsets, silly Sens. Inhofe and Cornyn—the new crazy Republican position is that states that face devastating natural disasters can get bent.

In 2009, he founded his own tea partyesque group called STAND. While the top issue of the hardcore social conservative group was to create a yearly American History Month, in part to help offset the "balkanizing" influence of things like Black History Month and Gay Pride Month, the second "top issue" was to call for "an end to the hyphenated American." That this made it onto the list before such social conservative mantras as the anti-abortion and anti-marriage-equality planks is odd, and the nice text at the top of his web page declaring Jackson as "Standing Up For The Judeo-Christian History And Values Which Made America Great" would be outright embarrassing, if that really were a hyphen there describing Americans. It's not, though—that's just an ant on your computer screen. That's another ant on his left-hand sidebar, which means you must have been eating at your computer again.

He's on Twitter, and it's exactly what you'd expect.

As for his history of spectacularly nasty rhetoric calling homosexuals "sick people," Democrats "slave masters" and Planned Parenthood "the Ku Klux Klan," etc., Jackson isn't backing down. "I say the things that I say because I'm a Christian," he told reporters, adding "attacking me because I hold to those principles is attacking every church-going person." Well, glad we've cleared that up. He also says, "I do not retract anything that I said."

So he's an ardent social conservative who's into rhetoric about how the other side is like the Klan, who doubts other people really are the religions they say they are, who doesn't believe the federal government should help disaster victims, who thinks gays are "sick" and "ikky" and who wants to unite some hyphens against the other hyphens in order to end hyphens, all the while saying that if you attack him for being a f--king insane hatemonger you're persecuting him and all his fellow Christians. Was I right about him being cloned in a GOP "batshit crazy" vat, or what?

Welcome, Mr. Jackson, to the Republican big leagues. Oh, you're gonna fit right in. And if the Republicans don't erect a statue to you in the next few years, I am almost positive the Democrats will do it for them.