MORE ABOUT THE MULTILAYERED CREEPINESS OF CARL PALADINO

Here's an image that appears on the Carl Paladino campaign Web site:

It probably won't surprise you if I tell you that Paladino is lying about the fact that that Andrew Cuomo owns a Chihuahua. As the September 17 New York Times reported, Cuomo has been seen in the presence of a small Chihuahua-like dog, but the dog belongs to his kids, who don't live with him:

... while Mr. Cuomo does not own a dog himself, his three daughters -- twins Mariah and Cara, 15, and Michaela, 12 -- do have a dog named Angus. It resides, however, in the home of their mother, Kerry Kennedy, Mr. Cuomo's former wife.

"The dog belongs to Kerry Kennedy and their daughters," Josh Vlasto, a campaign spokesman, said in a statement. "It is a small brown dog that was adopted from a pound where it was saved from imminent demise. It is of unknown age and unknown origin."...

For the moment, I'm ignoring the obvious question of what the hell this has to do with who would be a better governor for the state of New York. Clearly, Carl Paladino regards this race as a dick-swinging contest -- so, in opposition to Cuomo's daughters' dog, he uses his own pit bull as a campaign prop. Real mature guy.

But this is where it gets weird. Paladino's dog had a previous owner -- and not just any owner:

Technically a British Staffordshire bull terrier, Duke, 5, belonged to Mr. Paladino's son, who died in a car accident last year. The dog is now a regular on the campaign trail, where his breed (if not his behavior) has made him a mascot for Mr. Paladino's gruff antagonism to the Albany powers-that-be.

That's right: the pit bull belonged to his son Patrick -- the one who died in a car accident last year. The one whose death prompted Paladino to tell his wife about the daughter he once fathered with another woman in an adulterous affair.

You'd think owning a dead child's dog would be bittersweet for Paladino. But no -- he clearly loves using the dog as a prop. One of his favorite jokes is to refer to the pit bull as his "chief of staff."

Let's review. The guy's son dies suddenly. He adopts the kid's dangerous-seeming dog -- and then uses his dead son's dog as his surrogate penis, as a means of trying to challenge the manhood of other men.

I don't know what the hell Freud would have made of this guy.

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(Regarding the debate: as I explained last week, Cuomo and Paladino are having trouble agreeing on which minor-party candidates will participate if they debate. One candidate Cuomo, a party-mate of Eliot Spitzer, would prefer not to debate is a former madam whose candidacy is a Roger Stone prank -- as, to a large extent, is Paladino's candidacy.)