It turns out that the new House Majority Whip in the Congress spoke to David Duke’s white supremacist group in 2002:

Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 3 Republican in the House, addressed a group of white supremacists and neo-Nazis in 2002, a Scalise spokeswoman confirmed Monday as his party prepared to take control of both chambers of Congress.

Mr. Scalise made his remarks to the European-American Unity and Rights Organization, which was founded two years earlier by David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader and Louisiana politician. Mr. Scalise was a Louisiana state legislator at the time.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has described the organization — which uses EURO as an acronym — as a hate group, while noting that in recent years it has “accomplished little” and serves “primarily as a vehicle to publicize Duke’s writing and sell his books.”

Moira Bagley Smith, a Scalise spokeswoman, said the congressman “has never been affiliated with the abhorrent group in question.”

Dude?!?!?

Why are you dissing your base?

Seriously, David Duke in 2002?  How could you not know who you were talking to.

Then again, the Republican party is far less inclusive than it was in 2002, when Trent Lott was bounced as Senate Majority leader for endorsing Strom Thrumond’s 1948 segregationist bid for the White House.