DENVER, Colorado — As an advocate for eugenics, former Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo is hardly a trailblazer. He follows in the footsteps of pioneers such as Strom Thurmond, George Wallace and David Duke. But what Tancredo lacks in originality, he makes up for in spirit.
In 2006, he addressed the “Americans Have Had Enough Coalition” in South Carolina, heavily sponsored by the League of the South. Tancredo extolled the virtues of Robert E. Lee while draped in Confederate battle flags, which caused the audience to break out in the singing of “Dixie.”
In 2007, Tancredo told attendees in an Iowa townhall meeting that bombing the holy sites of Mecca and Medina was the “only thing” he could think of to deter a nuclear attack against the United States by al Qaeda. Military experts contradicted him by agreeing that locating Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and killing him was likely to be a more effective course of action. Inside sources say Tancredo’s mysterious response was, “That’s what ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ gets you.”
During the 2009 confirmation hearing for Judge Sonia Sotomayor, he compared the Hispanic-American advocacy group La Raza to the KKK. “It’s a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses,” Tancredo assured congress members. “I’ve seen a lot of hoods and nooses in my day, and believe me, you don’t need them anymore to make your point.”
It was Tancredo’s appearance at last week’s Tea Bagger rally, however, that confirmed his standing as one of the country’s whitest men when he blurted out, “People who could not even spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. His name is Barack Hussein Obama.”
Tancredo then called for reinstating a civics literacy test, offering 100 sample questions originally used by the Woodrow Wilson administration for the naturalization exam.
But this morning, scandal rocked Tancredo’s future political tea-bagging prospects when his unknown traveling companion was shot dead in a Georgia convenience store.
According to the available information, Tancredo was touring the southern states with a 17-year-old aid who was in the country as part of a program to educate teenage Brazilian males on conservative values in the American political system. The shooting occurred after Tancredo ducked into the mini mart to buy some Tums. Investigators say they also found a pack of condoms and two tubs of Vaseline on the counter, but Tancredo denied knowledge of how those items ended up there.
Eye witnesses outside the convenience store say that prior to the incident they saw the boy fiddling around with the glove box. One witness told police, “He turned the latch and a large white bed sheet with two eye holes and a hood popped out. Then the kid jumped from the car, put the thing over his body and ran into the market singing what sounded like the theme to ‘Casper the Friendly Ghost’ in Portuguese.”
When the teen bounded into the store, a horrified and panic-stricken clerk produced a revolver and fired three times into the boy’s covered face. He was pronounced dead on the scene.
A quivering Tancredo told authorities he had no idea where the boy had gotten the outfit. “It was a rental car. Could’ve been anybody’s. But I can’t believe what happened. I know he enjoyed playing ‘dress up,’ but…this is just such a tragedy.”
Tancredo is being held for further questioning by local police.