Fuck you Tancredo.

I'm still seething over remarks made by former congressman Tom Tancredo (bloody foreign sounding name) at the Tea Party convention this past Saturday. He called for the renewal of a "civics literacy test" for voters, the kind of test that was used back in the fifties in the south to prevent blacks from voting.

He also suggested that such a test today would have prevented Barack Obama from becoming president. The implication being, of course, that Obama's supporters are a bunch of illiterate, ill-informed nincompoops. 

So I've done some research on the google and lo and behold looky here at what I discovered. Granted this civics literacy survey by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute is from November 2008, but since it was around the same time as the election, I think it's still valid.

Bottom line, elected officials scored lower than the general public, although to be fair, the numbers were shockingly low for everyone. 74% of public officials failed the test compared to 71% of the public. In fact, officeholders were less likely than other respondents to correctly answer 29 of the 33 test questions.

Of course you don't need a civics literacy test to spot an ill-informed nincompoop elected official.