Brian Bilbray is a Republican congressman. Not even from Arizona, mind you, but from California. But he just couldn’t resist defending Arizona’s new racial profiling law, the one that inspired John McCain to babble about “the drivers of cars with illegals in it (sic) that (sic) are intentionally causing accidents on the freeway.”

(Bilbray’s eagerness to defend the Arizona law doubtless has something to do with his membership in the cult of Tancredo.)

And when Bilbray opened his mouth to defend the law, what he brayed was the astonishing thesis that trained professionals can spot illegal immigrants simply by how they’re dressed, and by their behavior:

Chris Matthews: …like what, like what? Give me a non-ethnic aspect that would tell you to pick up somebody.

Rep. Bilbray: They will look at the kind of dress you wear, there’s different type of attire, there’s different type of …right down to the shoes, right down to the clothes. But mostly by behavior it’s mostly behavior, just as the law enforcement people here in Washington, DC does it based on certain criminal activity there is behavior things that professionals are trained in across the board and this group shouldn’t be exempt from those observations as much as anybody else.

I don’t know about spotting illegal immigrants — which may simply reflect deficiencies in my training — but I know for a fact that galloping stupidity can be detected by dint of observation.

Actually, it doesn’t even require training. It’s not a matter of observation, so much as measurement. All you do is measure the distance from the sole of the foot to the top of the head. And express it as a proportion of the subject’s height.

In serious cases of galloping stupidity, the proportion drops way below 50%. That’s because, just like Bilbray, for example, the foot is found to be lodged deep in the mouth, while the head is stuck firmly in the business end of the alimentary canal.