Tancredo makes a ha-ha

Media Matters has a brief note on Tom "Mexicans? EEEEEWWWW" Tancredo's speech at TeaBagCon10, which included the following rhetorical gem:

And then, something really odd happened, mostly because I think that we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in this country. People who could not even spell the word "vote," or say it in English, put a committed socialist idealogue in the White House, name is Barack Hussein Obama.

I have an idea. Let's form two experimental groups, one consisting of Latino immigrants (who are, you know, required to pass a goddamn civics test before obtaining the right to vote) and the other of Teabagging aficionados. Let's see who does better on a "civics literacy test."

It is a common source of humor in my line of work that foreign-born students, many of whom are brand new to the U.S. and not all of whom have terrific facility with English yet, routinely beat the pants off of American-born and -educated students in college-level American government courses. Pitor from Kraków routinely tells me a lot more about the 4th Amendment than Peter from Knoxville. And he does so in sentences featuring punctuation.