Retired Air Force Col. Rob Maness, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Louisiana, called on President Obama to apologize to residents of Louisiana for a 16-page “guidance” sent out last week by his Department of Justice that cautioned Louisianans not to be racist in hiring people to help them clean up after the recent floods that killed 13 and forced more than 30,000 to abandon their homes.
“We’re insulted by the President of the United States and his Department of Justice, and he ought to issue a retraction of that [guidance] to all the good people of Louisiana,” Maness told Breitbart political editor Matt Boyle on Sirius XM Patriot Channel’s Breitbart News Sunday.
“The good folks down here where I live in Southern Louisiana are just absolutely more than appalled. We’re just livid about it. The man ought to apologize to the people of this great state,” Maness said of the president.
Maness explained the contents of the memo.
“The U.S. Department of Justice under President Barack Obama issued letters to the survivors [in] Louisiana of this great flood of 2016 and said ‘you better not be racist down there’… They sent letters that hit the streets a few days ago, maybe yesterday, that basically warned the citizens of Louisiana that you better not be racist when you’re hiring people to fix your homes,” Maness said.
“You know what? We’re tired of being called racists. And I think that that’s the number one issue in the United States of America. Those people [at the DOJ] can just go to hell. They’re not my Department of Justice,” the retired Air Force colonel added.
Maness then praised the can-do spirit of Louisianans in spite of the devastation brought on by the flood.
“Just look at the pictures of the Cajun Navy out there, volunteers, nobody asked them to show up,” Maness said.
“One of my supporters said it, and I’ll continue to use it. His name is Peter. He said, ‘Look, It’s like Dunkirk. People just showed up with their fishing boats. Nobody told them to go,’” Maness noted, referring to the successful evacuation of more than 300,000 British troops from the shores of Dunkirk, France, in 1940 when they were surrounded by Hitler’s advancing army by a home-grown flotilla of civilian crafts of all sizes and types.
“We here in Louisiana are the greatest examples of what it means to be American. And we all work together.”
“The Cajun Navy, and the people of Louisiana, we don’t give a damn what your skin color is,” Maness said of his fellow Louisianans.
Everyone, Maness said, has been pitching in.
“Look at all the pictures of black men carrying white kids, white women carrying black kids,” he explained.
The guidance issued by the Department of Justice on Tuesday is quite remarkable in its condescension towards the citizens of Louisiana, as the Washington Times reported:
In a 16-page guidance issued Tuesday, the Obama administration, led by the Justice Department, warned Louisiana recipients of federal disaster assistance against engaging in “unlawful discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin (including limited English proficiency).”
The guidance’s frameworks “highlight the importance of complying with nondiscrimination requirements of civil rights statutes, addressing the needs of the whole community, and ensuring equal opportunity to access recovery efforts.”
Needless to say, some Louisiana residents were offended, including the American Conservative’s Rod Dreher, who took umbrage at receiving an anti-discrimination lecture from Washington, D.C., as locals struggle to rescue, house and feed their neighbors.
“[E]verywhere you look you can find black folks and white folks loving on each other, helping each other through this crisis,” Mr. Dreher said in a Thursday post.
He referred to the guidance as a “long bureaucratic memo” issued by the “Department of Justice and many other agencies of the executive branch overseen by He Who Cannot Be Troubled to Leave Martha’s Vineyard.”
Maness also praised GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump and his running mate Mike Pence for touring flood-ravaged Louisiana on Friday, and he blasted President Obama for golfing on Martha’s Vineyard instead of visiting Louisiana and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for “phoning it in” to Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, then flying off to a fundraiser on Martha’s Vineyard with Cher.
“It shows that no-show Hillary Clinton and no-show Barack Obama aren’t leaders of the American people,” Maness said.
“Leadership in crisis is showing up at the point of crisis… that’s what Donald Trump and Mike Pence just did. You couldn’t ask for better leaders [than Trump and Pence],” he added.
Maness said President Obama’s last minute decision to visit Louisiana this coming Tuesday “is purely a political response to save his bacon and to save Hillary Clinton’s bacon.”
“No wonder our governance has gone to hell,” he said. “They’d rather be raising money on Martha’s Vineyard,” he said of the two Democratic politicians.
As for Hillary’s chances of winning Louisiana against Trump in November, Maness said Louisianans have a message for the former Secretary of State.
“Being a no-show is going to cost you,” he said of Clinton
In the most recent poll of the Louisiana Senate race, conducted in June by GBA Strategies, Maness is a distant fifth with 8 percent of the vote. Frontrunner John Neely Kennedy, also a Republican and currently State Treasurer, has 28 percent.
A more recent poll, conducted by Pulse Opinion Research in July, shows Maness in third place, within striking distance of Kennedy.
The independent poll, commissioned by New Orleans business executive William “Bo” Reily, shows Kennedy in first place with 25 percent, Democrat Foster Campbell in second place with 16 percent, and Maness in third with 14 percent.
This is Maness’s second run for the U.S. Senate in Louisiana. He placed a distant third in the 2014 “jungle primary” with 14 percent of the vote. Dr. Bill Cassidy and incumbent Senator Mary Landrieu, a Democrat, won the top two spots, each receiving more than 40 percent of the vote. Cassidy went on to easily defeat Landrieu in the two-person runoff in December.
You can hear the full interview of Col. Rob Maness (retired) here:
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