January 27, 2009 02:31 AM UTC

Stay Classy, Dave Schultheis

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Denver Post reports:

Sen. Dave Schultheis says the Colorado Department of Transportation is wasting mucho dinero by running ads in Spanish that urge drivers to buckle up.

“All these ads are going to do is provide one more assimilation off-ramp for new arrivals,” Schultheis, R-Colorado Springs, said today. “Bilingualism in our buckle-up ads – just like bilingualism in our schools – will only encourage the further balkanization of our culture, reduce the pressure on new immigrants to learn English and make it harder in the long run for immigrants to become Americans.”

The department is holding a press conference to announce the TV ad campaign, its first ever Spanish ad campaign, on Tuesday. According to agency spokeswoman Stacey Stegman, 23 percent of all fatal-accident victims last year were Latino…

Schultheis wondered where the accommodation of foreign languages ends.

“Can we expect a new round of PSAs from CDOT later on this year in Vietnamese, Mandarin Chinese or some other foreign language?” he asked.

Stegman replied, “If in Colorado there were the same large numbers of those populations that were unbuckled, we would do what we could to address those as well.

“Our programs are about saving lives, regardless of the race.” [Pols emphasis]

Almost as thoughtful as when his first reaction after hearing about an bad car accident in Greeley was to assume there were illegal immigrants involved–because the victims’ surname was “Bustillos.” Here you think we’ve come all this way in the last year, not getting, you know, all overtly racial about stuff anymore, and there’s Dave Schultheis proving you wrong.

Look folks, Jim “Black Moral Poverty” Welker and Doug “Knee-Jerk” Bruce are gone, and there was a vacuum in the Republican caucus that, let’s be frank, needed filling. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the latest reason for non-whackjob Republicans to eye the floor in shame.

More wingnuttery coverage. This can’t be made up.