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February 25, 2011 08:15 PM UTC

At Least He's Not Your Chuckling Congressman

  • 9 Comments
  • 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.

Comments

9 thoughts on “At Least He’s Not Your Chuckling Congressman

  1. Tragically, the right wing in this country sees the advocacy, or at least the tolerance, or political violence as an acceptable price to be paid for power.

    You would think that the attempted murder of Congresswoman Giffords would wake them up, even though it is not at all clear that the shooter’s political views had anything to do with his alleged actions.

    If that didn’t, or won’t, then maybe they should recall the attempted assassinations of Mr. Reagan and Mr. Ford, the attack on Congress in the 1950s, and, yes, the murder of Presidents Kennedy, McKinley, Garfield, and Lincoln.

    Once our society starts sanctioning the casual salute to the use of violence to make a political point, we are no longer truly a republic governed by law and democratic institutions. We are instead on the road to being at the whim of a mob.

    Congressman Broun, no doubt, does not want to see President Obama killed. But he acted irresponsibly in not immediately condemning the comments and in using the opportunity to educate his audience about how inappropriate and counter-productive they are.

    It saddens me that there are people who seem actually to think that our president deserves to be murdered because of his political views. We have a responsibility to discuss and debate our views in a civil manner. Even name-calling and trivialization of someone’s point of view is wrong, but this guy has crossed a clear line. I hope the U.S. Secret Service pays him a visit very soon.

     

    1. I think that it is equally contemptible that Broun has not issued an apology.  In the moment, it might be defensible for Broun to simply claim that he was caught off guard and did not handle the situation properly.  But now, three days later, all we get from his spokesperson is, “Obviously, the question was inappropriate, so Congressman Broun moved on.” That is weak.  How about, “The question was outrageous and an affront to our democratic ideals, and the Congressman condemns such sentiments and will condemn them, on the spot, in the future.”  

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