The special election for New York's 26th congressional district seat — the one left vacant by our beloved Craigslist Congressman, former Rep. Chris Lee — is 12 days away, and the race is rapidly becoming hilarious. Mostly because of the rich, 78-year-old buzzard running as a third-party candidate on the "Tea Party" line, Jack Davis, whose healthy poll numbers could help deny Republicans a victory in this extremely conservative district. So who is this guy, and why is he slapping cameras?

Davis has run for the seat three times before — as a Democrat. None of those attempts worked so well for him, so this time he just put his name on the ballot next to the words "Tea Party" and voila, he's running a healthy 20ish percent in the polls. The Republican party, needless to say, is now burning through millions of Karl Rove's SuperPAC money to destroy both Davis and Democratic candidate Kathy Hochul.

Republicans also put a tracker on Davis' trail to monitor his crazy statements and hopefully get him to threaten and abuse the tracker with funny old man slaps. Well, the latter finally happened last night! You can see it for yourself in the very special clip up top, but the gist is: Republican tracker asks why Davis won't participate in a debate, Davis says "You want punched out?" — again, that's "You want punched out?" — Davis slaps the tracker's camera, Davis' aide slaps the tracker's camera, and the tracker utters the most exaggerated fake groans of pain ever caught on tape.

It's all so sad. Sad enough for us to pay extra close attention to this race from now on!

[via TPM]