The U.S. is a big country, which means that just about any demographic group will contain a certain number of assholes. Sometimes those assholes will even reach positions of importance, as is the case with Democratic Senate candidate Mark Clayton. Here’s what Clayton stands for:

Mark Clayton believes the federal government is building a massive, four-football-field wide superhighway from Mexico City to Toronto as part of a secret plot to establish a new North American Union that will bring an end to America as we know it. On Thursday, he became the Tennessee Democrats’ nominee for US Senate.

Clayton, an anti-gay-marriage activist and flooring installer with a penchant for fringe conspiracy theories, finished on top of a crowded primary field in the race to take on GOP Sen. Bob Corker this fall. He earned 26 percent of the vote despite raising no money and listing the wrong opponent on his campaign website. The site still reads, “DEDICATED TO THE DEFEAT OF NEO-CONSERVATIVE LAMAR ALEXANDER,” whom Clayton tried to challenge in 2008. (That year, he didn’t earn the Democratic nomination.)

On his issues page, Clayton sounds more like a member of the John Birch Society than a rank-and-file Democrat. He says he’s against national ID cards, the North American Union, and the “NAFTA superhighway,” a nonexistent proposal that’s become a rallying cry in the far-right fever swamps. Elsewhere, he warns of an encroaching “godless new world order” and suggests that Americans who speak out against government policies could some day be placed in “a bone-crushing prison camp similar to the one Alexander Solzhenitsyn was sent or to one of FEMA’s prison camps.” (There are no FEMA prison camps.)

Basically, he sounds like your average Tea Partier (Clayton probably won the nomination because his name was first on the primary ballot). The difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties is their reaction to Tea Party madness. Republicans place lunatics like Michele Bachmann on the House Intelligence Committee (absurd in so many ways) or play footsie with their madness, while the Tennessee Democrats, to their credit, publicly disown this madman:

“Mark Clayton is associated with a known hate group in Washington, D.C., and the Tennessee Democratic Party disavows his candidacy, will not do anything to promote or support him in any way, and urges Democrats to write-in a candidate of their choice in November.”

While it’s good to see them call an anti-gay marriage group a hate group, the fucking morons that run the Tennessee Democrats should have never let this happen.

Although, unlike Republicans, they do realize this is a bad thing.