“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” National Council of La Raza spokesperson Lisa Navarrete told The Colorado Independent. “He’s defamed our organization and told falsehoods about our organization without any basis in fact or evidence. That’s not who we are or what we do.

“If you look at Mr. Tancredos’ record, he’s often spoken about things he doesn’t know anything about.”

While the stakes couldn’t be higher, with Sotomayor poised to become the first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court, Navarrete sounded more weary than incensed over Tancredo’s latest antic.

“He’s at the far extreme of the Republican Party,” she said. “He’s someone who has been instrumental in alienating the Republican Party from the Latino community. We’ve been urging the Republican Party to try to outreach to the Latino community, and they did a good job of it until they let people like Tom Tancredo take over the debate on immigration.”

A congressman from the 6th Congressional District until he retired last year, Tancredo has made statements over the years threatening to bomb Mecca, calling Miami a Third World city and suggesting the U.S.-Mexico border wall separate Brownsville, Texas, from the rest of America.

It’s not the first time the Latino civil rights group has been inaccurately characterized by Tancredo, Navarrete said, though he hasn’t gone so far as to compare NCLR with the Ku Klux Klan before.

“He is a leading spokesperson and a leading figure in the anti-immigrant extremist movement, and as such we’re a target for anti-immigrant extremists,” Navarrete said.

Two years ago, before giving up his failed presidential campaign, Tancredo famously sang “Dixie” standing in front of Confederate flags in Columbia, S.C. His audience: a secessionist group and others called bigoted hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“He has hung around with a lot of bigots,” Navarrete said, “that’s where he’s getting his information, or misinformation from.”

Tancredo piled on the information, or misinformation, during his CNN appearance, making the charge NCLR’s “logo is ‘All for the race, nothing for the rest.’ ”

“What he said was our motto is not our motto,” Navarrete said, giving Tancredo the benefit of the doubt that he meant motto, not logo. “It’s not anybody’s motto. He doesn’t really know what he’s talking about if he doesn’t know the difference between a logo and a motto.”

As for the phrase Tancredo finds so offensive? “It was a phrase that was found in a document from a college student group more than 40 years ago but has nothing to do with our organization,” Navarrete said.

She pointed to an NCLR site devoted to debunking misperceptions and critics who are “willfully distorting the facts and deliberately mischaracterizing our organization and our work.”

If you belong to an organization, called La Raza, in this case, which is — from my point of view anyway, is nothing more than a Latino, it’s a counterpart — it’s a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses. If you belong to something like that, you’ve got to explain it in a way that’s going to convince me and a lot of other people it’s got nothing to do with race, even though the logo is “All for the race, nothing for the rest.”

“She’s a member! She’s a member of La Raza!” Tancredo says as the CNN host tries to steer the conversation away from La Raza. “But she’s a member! She’s a member of La Raza!”

Watch for yourself:

TPM’s Josh Marshall puts it thus:

For those who aren’t familiar with it, La Raza is basically a Latino equivalent of B’nai Brith or the NAACP. Garden variety and uncontroversial unless you thinks it’s a public safety issue if more than a handful of Mexicans or Puerto Ricans get together in one place at the same time.

La Raza, by the way, counts executives from Johnson & Johnson, Comcast and Wal-Mart on its executive board and has sponsors including The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Pepsi and the U.S. Department of Education.

The KKK doesn’t list corporate sponsors but does manage to misspell “evangelism” on its home page and sells a “Cross Pin with the Letters KKK below” for $3 as part of its fundraising campaign.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, or MALDEF, has launched a new project called “Truth in Immigration.” The group’s Web site will challenge misleading statements about immigrants and Latinos made in the media, on the campaign trail and in the messages of anti-immigrant groups.

“Stereotypes and myths disseminated by political pundits, candidates for elected office, media networks, anti-immigrant organizations and hate groups poison the atmosphere for a well reasoned debate on immigration reform,” said John Trasvi