Some real news in this campaign: This is how far out politics got in 2010.

Art Robinson, running in the Oregon 4th district, had to be one of the most peculiar congressional candidates in the national in 2010 – and that’s quite some company. A climate change denier who lives on what amounts to a remote compound, his rundown of contentions will hold up with any of the year’s better known national odd candidates.

One sample quote will give some of the flavor: “Public education (tax-financed socialism) has become the most widespread and devastating form of child abuse and racism in the United States. Moreover, people who have been cut off at the knees by public education are so mentally handicapped that they cannot be responsible custodians of the energy technology base or other advanced accomplishments of our civilization. These ignorant people vote, and their votes are beginning to destroy our way of life. Can this problem be corrected? Yes. Can it be corrected by improving the public schools? No – only by abolishing them.”

The arrival of such a candidate wasn’t the really noteworthy thing. That would be mass of money, deep into six figures, spent on his behalf – though not through his campaign – aimed squarely at the Democratic incumbent in the district, Peter DeFazio. DeFazio himself went viral when, camera-accompanied, he took to the mean streets of D.C. to try to track down (Michael Moore style) whoever it was that financed the mass TV campaign against him. (The association which paid for it, whose title sounded like a mass grass-roots group, turned out to be a couple of wealthy guys – a hedge fund manager and a construction executive – on the east coast.)

A sign of things to come?

Oh, and there’s this from Robinson’s campaign web site: “Art Robinson will be running again in the 2012 election. We have made a tremendous amount of progress and if we all keep working – starting now – we will have a much better chance then.”