The 6 Most Insane People to Ever Run for President

There is nothing in the Constitution that says you have to be sane to run for president. The forefathers knew that such an arbitrary limitation would deprive future generations of a tremendous amount of entertainment.

So, let's honor their wishes and take a moment to salute those who believed being batshit insane should in no way stop them from running the country.

If you're one of those people with a soft spot for wasting your vote on potentially loony candidates, do we have good news for you! Depending on when you're reading this, there may still be time to cast your wacky-ass vote for Green Party nominee Cynthia McKinney!

Until 2006, she was a member of Congress, where she spent her time on important things like trying to pass a bill to release the government's secret records on Tupac Shakur and assaulting Capitol police.

"Why am I holding these? Where am I?"

But wait, it gets better. McKinney upped the crazy ante recently when she claimed that the government executed 5,000 males and dumped them in a swamp in Louisiana. She stated that she assumed they were prisoners, because they were mostly males. Why, because only dudes go to prison? Somebody has never seen Caged Heat.

Prison is more relaxing without the specter of government mass murder.

This information supposedly came to her via a phone call from a woman whose son was one of those tasked with disposing of the bodies. Sure, that probably sounds dubious, but McKinney assures us she took the extra step of verifying the story with insiders. We're hoping that "insiders" is the loving pet name she's given to the voices in her head. Otherwise, someone out there with information to share that, if true, could be vital to the very fabric of American life, decided that the best place to go with it was here...

Lyndon LaRouche has run for president at least eight times, first in 1976 as the U.S. Labor Party candidate, and later as a candidate for the Democratic nomination. Depending on who you ask, he is either a genius visionary or a batshit insane conspiracy theorist. Hmm, let's see if we can find some evidence one way or the other...

Where do we start? He thinks either the Holocaust didn't happen or, if it did, wasn't all that bad and that some kind of evil Jewish/British cabal is at the heart of the world's problems. His political party looks an awful lot like a cult, with LaRouche holding tight-fisted control over a core group of dedicated followers.

Those are all good places to begin, but why settle for the good when we can go straight for the great? And by "great" we mean "the time he claimed someone kidnapped and brainwashed one of his staff members with the intent of programming them to assassinate him." According to LaRouche's group, the intended assassin was Chris White, a British national who had married LaRouche's ex-girlfriend. The young man was allegedly kidnapped by the CIA, in conjunction with the KGB. Sounds reasonable enough, what better friends were there in 1974 than the CIA and the KGB?

BFFs.

LaRouche's people said that, once in captivity, White was programmed so that when a trigger word was uttered, White would kill his wife, then LaRouche, and then blame the whole thing on Cuban assassins (got to work the Cubans in there). After all, if some dude just went crazy and killed his wife and her ex-boyfriend, how would you ever explain that?

John G. Schmitz had a beef with Richard Nixon (when Nixon made his historic trip to China, Schmitz quite hilariously said "I was only upset that he came back"). Schmitz decided the best way to take out his anger was by running for President against Nixon in 1972, hoping to saddle Nixon with the shame of losing to someone who was frothingly insane.

If someone ever decides to compile recordings of the craziest things every said to the media, they may as well call it "John G Schmitz: The Greatest Hits," and not just because that title rhymes. For example, there was the time he casually suggested the US could benefit from a military coup to overthrow the government. But in his words, "Not a bad military coup, mind you. But a good one, like Pinochet's in Chile." Oh, okay! We thought you were saying something retarded there for a moment.

Bat-Schmitz insane.

He did have a way with the ladies though. After a particularly heated exchange with feminist lawyer Gloria Allred, Schmitz approved a press release with the catchy headline "Attack of the Bulldykes" that described Allred as a "slick butch lawyeress" and her supporters as "a sea of hard, Jewish and (arguably) female faces."

Schmitz is dead now, but fear not, the crazy lives on in a major way through his daughter, Mary Kay LeTourneau. Name sound vaguely familiar? Maybe you remember it from the several years she was in the headlines for having sex with a 13 year-old student (she was a teacher-they met when he was 8) and having two of his children. She went to jail for rape, then when she got out she did the honorable thing and married him. But, hey, at least she didn't run for president.