Have you kids heard of Joe Miller? Well, if not, he's the batshit crazy conservative motherfucker who was on the Republican ticket in Alaska's U.S. Senate race.

Here's the short version of the story: Joe Miller came out of nowhere to challenge incumbent Lisa Murkowski for the Republican nomination. Nobody thought he'd actually be able to do it. Dude was motherfucking crazy, even by Alaska standards. I mean, Alaska is a conservative place -- this is the state responsible for Sarah Palin -- but nobody actually thought that a crazy motherfucker like Miller would actually make it on the ballot. After all, hadn't the Palin business taught Alaskans to be a little more careful about their politics? They sure thought so.

As I see it (and this is from the perspective of someone who has not experienced the post-Palin AK political scene first hand, so take it with a fistful of salt), that was exactly the problem. They thought it couldn't happen again. No way would another crazy slip through like that. Alaskans got complacent.

So when the primary rolled around, the sane folks (which, in Alaska, means the mildly- to moderately-conservative city dwellers of Anchorage and Fairabnks) mostly stayed home. Why vote? Of course Lisa Murkowski would be on the ticket, and of course she'd win in November, because the Republican always wins. Who was that crazy Miller guy anyway? Just noise. Nothing to worry about.

Except that it was. All the fucking crazies crawled out of the woodwork to vote for him in the primary -- kind of like what happened in Ohio in the 2004 election. All the anti-gay crazies came out to vote against gay marriage, and that (in my opinion) is what cost the Democrats the presidential election. You have to admit -- the crazies have a phenomenal talent for rallying at election time. They know how to organize. They get shit done...in Ohio and in Alaska and across America. The rest of us could learn a thing or two from them.

But I digress.

The Alaska Senate race isn't over yet; it's going to be a while. It would appear that Lisa Murkowski, who ran a write-in campaign after the mind-boggling primary upset, is leading Miller -- and by quite a bit. 41% of the votes in that race were write-ins, which means that the majority of voters chose a write-in candidate. If the vast majority of those write-ins are for the same candidate, then that candidate will win. Whether Alaska has written in Murkowski or Mickey Mouse is TBA, though, and it will be a few weeks before it's all said and done.

This is a good cautionary tale, even if it turns out OK in the end. (If having Lisa Murkowski in the Senate can be called "OK." I guess it's a comparative sense of "OK.") This is a stark reminder that very bad things can happen when good people either take an election outcome for granted or give in to apathy or let their guards down.

That's the thing. The crazies never let their guard down...and neither should we. The crazies never take an election outcome for granted and the crazies are never apathetic. We'd do well to remember that.