Tanner First Dept. of Justice Section Head to Publicly Demonstrate Cultural Stupidity

It comes as no surprise that the chief of the Justice department's Civil Rights Division's voter's rights section John Tanner was recently quoted in front of a group from the National Latino Congreso in Los Angeles as saying: "...our society is such that minorities don't become elderly the way white people do. They die first."

TPM Muckraker offers some startling details.

This is where you can look inside the wounds of our collective culturegeist. This is look at one part of the core of reasons racism and prejudice persists as major social problems in the US today.

Back in *May I blogged about the lack of diversity amongst DOJ staff when Alberto Gonzales was under fire. Roberta Baskin of WJLA TV in Washington, DC brought attention to the fact that only two of the 250 attorneys in the Justice Department's civil rights division were black - there were two back in 1968.

(*click on May, 2007 and scroll down to the entry)

So now we hear that John Tanner is the man running the department responsible for enforcing the laws that protect the rights of Americans; and he's basically an ignorant bigot devoid of the sense God bestowed upon an ass. He approved a Georgia law requiring voters to show photo ID before voting at polls.

It's beyond appalling and as of Sunday, October 21st, Barack Obama was the only presidential candidate saying anything about it. Sunday's New York Times reported Obama had called on members of both political parties to demand Tanner's removal.