February 25, 2011 08:15 PM UTC

At Least He's Not Your Chuckling Congressman

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• by: Colorado Pols

Talking Points Memo, Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) didn’t get the civility memo:

Witnesses tell TPM that Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) laughed when an elderly man at his town hall meeting this week asked “Who’s gonna shoot Obama?”

Mark Farmer of Winterville, Georgia went to the meeting on Tuesday to ask a question about Social Security reform, and said in an e-mail to TPM he was “shocked by the first question and disgusted by the audience response.”

“I was gravely disappointed in the response of a U.S. Congressman who also laughed and then made no effort to correct the questioner on what constitutes proper behavior or to in any way distance himself from such hate filled language,” Farmer wrote.

Reporter Blake Aued, who was at the town hall and originally reported on the incident confirmed to TPM that Broun was “chuckling a little bit.”

To be fair, the Athens Banner-Herald reported what Rep. Broun did have to say in response to the question, once he, uh, stopped chuckling:

“The thing is, I know there’s a lot of frustration with this president. We’re going to have an election next year,” Broun said in response to the question. “Hopefully, we’ll elect somebody that’s going to be a conservative, limited-government president that will take a smaller, who will sign a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare.”

So, you can judge for yourself whether Rep. Broun should have included something in his answer about not shooting the President, but apparently that did not occur to him.

Because it was funny or something.