I’m not sure how this happened, but Alan Keyes recently rented an apartment in Calumet City, Illinois, and is now our Republican candidate for Senate. Really. This isn’t one of Adam’s hilarious comic scenarios; it’s true. One day we had this Republican candidate with excellent hair, who spent twenty years making millions on Wall Street, then two years teaching inner city kids in Chicago, and decided he needed to go to the Senate to make sure those kids got the benefit of permanent tax cuts on their dividend income. Then it turns out he asked a Borg to do something indecent in an “avante-garde nightclub,” and the next thing you know, Alan Keyes is on my TV calling for each and every citizen to have a machine gun. But only, you know, if they want to. Alan assures us that it wouldn’t be mandatory.

Alan (I call him Alan) specializes in saying unusual and provocative things. The title of his MSNBC TV show, which he was given as a consolation prize after not winning the Republican presidential nomination in 2000 (I believe Gary Bauer got a nice recliner and a year’s supply of Turtle Wax) was “Alan Keyes is Making Sense,” which, as a friend of mine pointed out, is protesting a bit much. Generally the rule is, if you are actually doing it, you don’t have to put it in the title of the show: thus we don’t tune in to “David Letterman Says Amusing Things,” or “Larry King Is Being Solicitous.” In those instances, we are allowed to trust our own instincts.

In just a few short weeks, Alan compared his African American opponent, Barack Obama, to the slaveholders of the antebellum South, called for tax breaks for Blacks as a reparation for slavery (Alan would qualify for this check-off, but not his opponent, who is descended from an African immigrant of more recent vintage) and, in my personal favorite, addressed the difficult question of gay marriage by telling Illinois’ homosexual community to keep it in their pants. He hasn’t so far called again for the abolition of the income tax , as he did in the 2000 race, or reiterated his belief that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to the states, as he said last year in support of Alabama Judge Roy Moore. But there’s time yet.

Sometimes for amusement’s sake, I try to imagine an alternate universe, in which a safe Republican state – say, Utah – looks certain to be sending another GOPer to Congress, and the state Democratic party hacks, in an act of desperation and self-preservation, because none of them want to go into history as the biggest loser in their states’ history, bring in… whom? What would be the leftist equivalent of an Alan Keyes? The head of the Communist Party USA? Some guy who wants to nationalize Microsoft because he believes Bill Gates is conspiring with Monsanto and the Gap to make woolen sweaters that can report his movements?

And then, when he loses, would he be given a cable TV talk show titled, “The Sweater Guy May Have a Point?”