What is wrong with these people? Part 3: Rep. Trent Franks & Hugh McInnish edition

And in our ever-popular What Is Wrong With These People? feature, we have

 Rep. Trent Franks:

 KEYES: What recourse does Congress have? Could you, for instance, defund the Department of Justice if they don’t reverse course and start to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act?

FRANKS: That’s probably the strongest leverage that we have. [...] I would support that in a moment. [...]

KEYES: I know Newt Gingrich has came out and said if they don’t reverse course here, we ought to be talking about possibly impeaching either Attorney General Holder or even President Obama to try to get them to reverse course. Do you think that is something you would support?

FRANK: If it could gain the collective support, absolutely. I called for Eric Holder to repudiate the policy to try terrorists within our civil courts, or resign. So it just seems like that they have an uncanny ability to get it wrong on almost all fronts.



And we also have Hugh McInnish of the Madison County Republican Executive Committee, schooling the Obama Department of Justice:

 The U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has been evaluating the Huntsville, AL school system’s racial integration, and earlier this month released a report that “wasn’t promising.” The DOJ listed “several outstanding desegregation issues that the school district must address,” including “that predominantly black schools have too few advanced courses” and “that black children at predominantly white schools are punished and suspended at alarming rates.”


But Hugh McInnish, a member of the Madison County Republican Executive Committee who also sits on the state Republican Executive Committee, set out to school the DOJ on the real reason racial disparities exist in Hunstville: “Life is unfair.” In a press conference at his gated community and a letter responding to the DOJ last week, McInnish offered a litany of bizarre “proof” that racial disparity isn’t “manmade,” claiming “blacks misbehave on average more frequently than whites do,” and that black students are unable to perform as well as white students. To McInnish, the only “manmade unfairness here” is that the DOJ wants to “correct a problem that is not of their making” (...)


[M]ost of McInnish’s data is cribbed from the right-wing New Century Foundation (NCF), which, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, is a “self-styled think tank” that propagates “academic racism.” Dedicated “to the ideal of the United States as a white European nation,” NCF also publishes the American Renaissance — a magazine that “publishes frequent articles on the discredited field of eugenics” which is “selective breeding to improve human genetic stock.” Incidentally, the foundation’s “most important publication” is The Color Of Crime (which, to NCF, is black.) (...)


But McInnish spends more time posting editorials on the white supremacist site VDare, and publishing the news aggregater Suppressed News which includes insightful comments like “Black on black racism is OK. White on black racism for the same reason is not. When are we going to wake up?”

 © 2005-2011 Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Good grief. Now, it's not like we don't have idiots in Swedish politics as well; in fact, the first parliamentary debate I saw a representative from the xenophobic Sverigedemokraterna in, in every statement he made he worked in a xenophobic talking point about "out of control mass immigration" or somesuch, regardless of whether it had anything to do with the subject at hand – but at least that guy isn't part of a party that controls more than 50% of parliament...