Rep.-elect Allen West. Photo by Gage Skidmore.

Oh, Congress. We always enjoy it so when the nation’s elected representatives decide to aimlessly act as a representative for the city which they’ll be working in. After all, there’s a long line of those — Louie Gohmert, Tom Coburn and Jason Chaffetz, to name but a few — who have so obviously pined to serve as a shadow representative or senator for the District of Columbia. Now, we realize that politicians think that they own this town — we’ve come to terms with it. The only thing that we ask is that before such politicians spout off about our hometown (which, face it, is bound to happen with all of them), they at least try to do a modicum of homework.

Obviously, Republican Florida Representative-elect Allen West didn’t get that memo. Here’s an excerpt of West, speaking during a roundtable on yesterday’s Meet The Press:

David Gregory: The–Congressman, the–on the issue of tax cuts, do you buy the president’s argument, “Look, let’s extend those Bush-era tax cuts for the middle class first, then we can come back and do the upper earners, or at least have that conversation”?

Representative-elect West: No. I think that we need to extend those tax cuts permanently across the board. Look, I come from a–an area down in South Florida where unemployment is at 13 percent, foreclosures are absolutely high. We are seeing closed upon closed storefronts. But yet, when you walk around here in Washington, D.C., you don’t see people getting laid off, you don’t see, you know, anyone suffering, you don’t see the foreclosures.

It’s true, Florida has been hit very hard by the recession, the banking crisis and the demise of the housing market. But perhaps we can be the ones to inform Representative-elect West that people in D.C. are indeed suffering. A 13 percent unemployment rate is certainly high — but D.C.’s current rate of 9.5 percent, including two large sections of the city where more than 19 percent of residents are out of work, doesn’t really line up with West’s assertion. As far as foreclosures go, West also probably didn’t realize that people lined up around Washington’s convention center and slept outside to gain access to a free Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America counseling session back in July — some of them even driving here from, yup, South Florida.

So yeah, even if West was aiming for the tired, old rhetoric of referring to Washington in only government terms, he missed the mark. Pretty badly, too.