While searching the internet for reporting on the Paris massacre -- the French are not stupid, so how did they miss this one? -- I come across the following statement:

ISIS isn’t necessarily evil. It is made up of people doing what they think is best for their community.

Suppose you don’t keep reading to find out who made this idiotic comment and instead try to figure it out on your own. Here are the most obvious options:

(a) An Islamic propaganda outfit like CAIR.

(b) An academic who thinks it’s all relative.

(c) A politician with a Muslim constituency.

You proceed to test these hypotheses and discover that the correct answer is:

(d) None of the above.

In the coming days Muslim apologists will doubtless trot out explanations and excuses for what happened in Paris. They will be joined by liberals who will urge our government not to “overreact.” Don’t be surprised if you also hear moral equivalence arguments about what Israel is doing to “the Palestinians.”

The cultural relativists who dominate academia will make sympathetic noises about the carnage in Paris but nevertheless warn that moral judgments are not absolute. What ISIS did was “bad for the French” but “good for ISIS” and that’s as far as we can go – except for what Israel is doing to “the Palestinians,” which is bad, period.

Option (c) would make sense if the politician was from Dearborn, Michigan or some other city with a large Muslim constituency. Pandering to voters is nothing new. Doing so in the face of something as outrageous as what happened in Paris would be a new low, however; but hey, if it means winning an election …

To end the suspense, the person who made the above comment is Minnesota’s Dan Kimmel who was running for the state’s House of Representatives to represent a district that includes northwestern Burnsville and all of Savage. I say “was” because Kimmel promptly abandoned his campaign following the uproar his comments caused.

Kimmel belongs to something called the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL). U.S. Senator Al “Stuart Smalley” Franken also belongs to the DFL. It’s the Democrat Party plus some hyphens nobody else uses in America.

The StarTribune provides the following background on Kimmel, proving that smart people can indeed say dumb things:

The native Oklahoman received appointments to West Point and the Air Force Academy, as well as a full Naval ROTC scholarship to the University of Oklahoma. He entered the Air Force Academy in June 1970. In 1972, he transferred to the University of Oklahoma and graduated in 1974 with a major in economics, then received a master’s in computer science from North Central (Ill.) College in 1991.

Kimmel’s resignation probably means that the 22-year-old Republican incumbent, Drew Christensen, will win re-election. Kimmel lost to Christensen in 2014.