Wednesday night, Rep. Paul Broun tried to bring an amendment to the spending bill under consideration by the House to strip all funds appropriated to enforce Title V of the 1965 Civil Rights Act. Coming from Broun, this is not much of a surprise. He has a record of being one of the most hateful legislators in the House, but this time John Lewis let him have it with both barrels.

Transcription via Think Progress:

It is hard, and difficult, and almost unbelievable that any Member — but especially a Member from the state of Georgia — would come and offer such amendment. There’s a long history in our country, especially in the 11 states that are old Confederacy — from Virginia to Texas — of discrimination based on race, on color. Maybe some of us need to study a little contemporary history dealing with the question of voting rights.

Just think, before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it was almost impossible for many people in the state of Georgia, in the state of Alabama, in Virginia, in Texas, to register to vote, to participate in the democratic process. The state of Mississippi, for example, had a black voting age population of more than 450,000, and only about 16,000 were registered to vote. One county in Alabama, the county was more than 80 percent [black], and not a single registered African-American voter. People had to pass a so-called literacy test. . . . one man was asked to count the number of bubbles in a bar of soap. Another man was asked to count the number of jelly beans in a jar.

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Liberals, as the tired conservative slander goes, hate America. This, of course, is nonsense. Liberals simply want to deliver on the national promise of a more perfect union, to shorten the distance, as Bruce Springsteen aptly put it, "between American ideals and American reality."

But if the past three Republican presidential debates are any indicator, it would appear that conservatives hate Americans. Or more precisely, some Americans. As audiences of the faithful booed an active duty U.S. soldier because he is gay and cheered the deaths of executed prisoners and the uninsured alike, the GOP White House hopefuls on stage remained silent. All because, it seems, they had to. Sadly, that complicity is apparently now a requirement to lead a Republican Party in which demonizing gays, minorities, immigrants and Muslims - that is, hating Americans - is increasingly a centerpiece of its politics.

For his part, Weekly Standard editor and conservative strategist Bill Kristol summed up Thursday night's GOP debate debacle in a single word - "Yikes":

Reading the reactions of thoughtful commentators after the stage emptied, talking with conservative policy types and GOP political operatives later last evening and this morning, we know we're not alone. Most won't express publicly just how horrified--or at least how demoralized--they are...

The e-mails flooding into our inbox during the evening were less guarded. Early on, we received this missive from a bright young conservative: "I'm watching my first GOP debate...and WE SOUND LIKE CRAZY PEOPLE!!!!" As the evening went on, the craziness receded, and the demoralized comments we received stressed the mediocrity of the field rather than its wackiness.

But Kristol's discomfort was with his party's messengers, not its message. And for years, that message has been unchanged. On this Republican Animal Farm, some Americans are more equal than others.

That was clear during the 2008 election. Before Rep. Robin Hayes (R-NC) said - and then denied saying - "liberals hate real Americans," the sound bite was firmly established as a GOP talking point. A few days before, McCain spokeswoman Nancy Pfotenhauer explained that northern Virginia was not the "real Virginia." GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin amplified on the point during an event in North Carolina:

"We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation."

To be sure, the Republicans' real Americans aren't Muslims. Long before Mitt Romney and Herman Cain first announced they would not appoint Muslim Americans to their cabinet, Republican leaders and their amen corner were calling for their profiling, internment and worse.

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As the debt ceiling vote looms over the head of America -- along with our credit rating being held in the balance -- Rep. Paul Broun not only won't vote to raise the debt ceiling, he wants to lower it. I'm not lying to you. Andrea Mitchell was asking Rep. Broun if he would vote for John Boehner's plan and actually he stood there with a straight face and said he introduced a bill to lower the debt ceiling.

Broun: I introduced a bill to lower the debt ceiling, not raise it. And i just think raising the debt ceiling is not the way to go. We need to lower it. We need to pay off the debt. We need to deal with the debt and we need to create a stronger economy. We just disagree on the tactics here. We both want to get to the same end result. That's to create jobs out in the -- throughout America.

Mitchell: Congressman, when you talk about lowering the debt ceiling, the debt ceiling is being raised to pay for money that has been appropriated by this Congress and previous Congresses, but in particular by this Congress. You're paying for what has already been charged not for future expenses.

Broun: Well, Andrea, the thing is when someone is overextended and broke they don't continue paying for expensive automobiles. They sell the expensive automobiles and buy a cheaper one. They don't continue paying for country club dues. They drop out of the country club. We need to pay down the debt. We need to create a strong economy, create jobs, and raising the debt ceiling is just going to make it worse long-term in my opinion. That's the reason that I think we need to go back to the drawing board. We need to do everything we can to cut expenses across the board to the federal government, so that we can put this financial house back in order. we cannot continue this fiscal fiasco here in Washington.

Andrea tries to explain to him what the debt ceiling is, but he either lacks the intelligence or is too stuck in ideology to be open, or even able, to hear what she has to say.

What Broun's essentially telling her is that he hopes the US economy will crash and burn, and that we become relegated to the economic status of a Third-World nation.

This might be the craziest thing I've heard coming from Republicans throughout this whole debt ceiling fiasco. And he's generated a lot of off-the-wall quotes in Congress over the course of his career. Here's a sampling:

Rep. Paul Broun wants to throw up when Democrats talk about "children" as he holds up picture of "children"

Rep. Paul Broun compares Progressives to Al-Qaeda

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Republicans love to use fear and scapegoating tactics against the left which can be hazardous to your health, but nothing conjures up those two qualities quite like the children.

Political Correction

Speaking on the House floor last night, Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) complained that an unwillingness on the part of Democrats to alter the fundamental structure of Social Security and Medicare put both programs in jeopardy. "I hear our Democrat colleague say all the time, 'it's the children,'" he said. "I heard a former speaker talk about the children so much that I wanted to throw up." As he was talking, Broun was holding up a poster-sized picture of his own grandchildren and arguing that the programs need to be restructured "so that they're still available when my kids get grown."

Moments later, Broun held up another poster purporting to describe the Democrats' approach to entitlement reform: "Deny It, Delay It, and Destroy It." Clearly not understanding the irony or hypocrisy of his comments, Broun charged that Republicans are interested in solutions while Democrats are only interested in demagoguery and playing politics.

BROUN: I hear our Democrat colleague say all the time, "it's the children." I heard a former speaker talk about the children so much that I wanted to throw up. But the thing is, when you talk about "it's the children and the future," we gotta deal with this debt. We've got to deal with Social Security and Medicare and make 'em economically viable by strengthening them, by making 'em so that they're still available when my kids get grown. We're going down the road right now, this president and the Democrats in the Senate, the Democrats here in the House, have a three-word plan.

Their plan is a three-word plan for Social Security and Medicare. Deny the problem, they denied it. They're delaying doing anything about it. And they're going to destroy it because both Medicare and Social Security are going broke if we don't strengthen it, if we don't make it economically viable, if we don't do the necessary hard work that this Congress and Republicans are trying to do. But what do we hear from our colleagues on the other side? Demagoguery. Demagoguery and trying to play politics. It's time to stop playing politics. It's time to stop playing games. The American people deserve the truth.

So many Americans use Social Security to live on as they become seniors and it's a pity that the GOP would like to destroy the program when it's not in any danger at all and doesn't add to the deficit fetishism that has overtaken Washington. if anything, the children are being cheated out of their social safety nets by hypocritical propagandists such as Rep. Broun.

For most Americans, July 4th is a well earned day off, with good food, drink, friends, family and fireworks. A day to get away from life's problems. However, for a very small few it's a time to ratchet up the hostilities.

Georgia Rep. Paul "Year of the Bible' Broun, once said this:

Broun: Well, it's all about freedom, actually. The Bible was the basis of our laws, it was the basis of the Constitution of the United States, the Declaration of Independence -- the Bible was the founding source.

What kind of a man of GOD couldn't even control himself on Independence day?

Political Correction:

On the Fourth of July, many lawmakers set aside partisan disagreements in favor of sweeping tributes to American freedom. But not Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA), who couldn't keep his abhorrence of Americans who disagree with his political views out of his invocation at a barbecue hosted by the Cobb County GOP. As the Marietta Daily Journal reports, Broun told attendees that America is "staring down in the deep chasm of socialism and total government control" thanks to progressives who "want to destroy us from the inside."

U.S. Rep. Paul Broun (R-Athens), who delivered the invocation, warned about the future of the U.S.

"We're standing on the precipice, staring down in the deep chasm of socialism and total government control," Broun said. [...]

There are those who wish to destroy the U.S., Broun said, citing radical Islam and "progressives."

"Father, there are many who want to destroy us from outside this nation," Broun said. "Folks like al-Qaeda and the radical Islamists. But there are folks that want to destroy us from inside, the progressives and the socialists, who want to make this nation a nation that's no longer under you, under God, but a nation that's ruled by man."

When I hear radical Christians talk like this I'm reminded of the words Jesus said: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Rep. Bible Broun most likely knows these very words very well, but he still spews venom every chance he can get our way. Wow. IOKIYAR

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I'm not the biggest fan of TSA security procedures myself, but I probably prefer them to the laughably ineffective regime that existed prior to 9/11. And I definitely prefer them to what the bedwetting wingnuts who want us to resort to ethnic profiling measures immediately instead of messing around with random searches, which they consider "political correctness."

Guys like wingnut Georgia GOP Rep. Paul Broun, who was on Fox News yesterday with Shannon Bream sharing his expertise -- the guy sits on the Homeland Security Committee, which is a disconcerting thought indeed -- because of TSA procedures he witnessed recently in an airport:

BREAM: Congressman, thanks for joining us today. What did you see that has you so upset?

BROUN: Well, Shannon, what happened at the airport is, uh, an elderly lady walked -- ah, followed me behind in the screening process, and she was patted down. A little kid was patted down. And this guy in Arabian attire just walks right through.

And the point of all this is that we have to focus upon those people who want to harm us. TSA has been abysmal -- abysmal failure. We're spending eight billion dollars a year on this, and we're -- we're focusing on these total body scans, these enhanced patdowns. We need more, uh, intelligence.

That we do, Congressman, that we do. In Congress, especially.

Broun wants everyone who wears "Arabian dress" to get the thorough patdown at TSA security checkpoints -- even though anyone even half-knowledgeable about antiterrorist security can tell you that no terrorist will wear garb that attracts attention to themselves. They are uniformly intent on blending in and being unnoticed. Anyone wearing "Arabian dress" is actually not likely at all to be a terrorist.

But that ain't no nevermind to someone like Broun. He has bigger fish to fry here:

BROUN: We need to focus on those people who are trying to harm us as a nation. And so it's absolutely critical for us change from this wasteful, um, inefficient -- type of screening that's going on at the airport. It's wasting billions of dollars and we need to start focusing upon what is absolutely going to help prevent people from being killed. And that's to get the human intelligence out there -- some -- infiltration into these various groups so that we know who is gonna harm us and so we stop these attacks, instead of wasting the taxpayers' money, instead of having this big hassle at the airport. It's costing American taxpayers, as well as the airline industry, billions of dollars.

See, Broun is one of those many Republicans who thinks that simple ethnic profiling measures will do the job and make us good and secure, and probably save us a bundle in the process. Skip the random patdowns and replace it with simple profiling of Muslims, and voila! No more need for a TSA.

This is, of course, rank stupidity guaranteed to get people killed, because it is guaranteed to make us more vulnerable. As we've explained previously:

If you want to profile every "known Muslim," you're going to have a hell of a time in countries like Indonesia and the Philippines, considering that their populations are a mix of the world's religions, and any Muslim who wanted to pose as a member of, say, a Christian church in order to fool authorities could do so with ease.

This just underscores how foolish the whole notion of racial profiling actually is, because when you embark on such policies, they actually make you more vulnerable, not less.

That's because terrorists are not that stupid. If you begin profiling for Middle Eastern men, they will find Indonesian or African or European operatives to perform the same task. If you begin profiling for Muslims, they will find ways to conceal their religious preferences.

We know two things about profiling, especially ethnic, religious, or racial profiling: 1) These policies expose the profilers to being gamed by terrorists; and 2) They are always a tremendous waste of resources and inevitably are counter-productive.

Sounds like your classic conservative solution: Hey, let's just make matters worse!

And waste a bundle of money while we're at it.

The best part is listening to Broun provide a down-home rationale for ethnic profiling, straight out of Dukes of Hazzard:

BREAM: But Congressman, how tough is this job now for the TSA, just to see the way that somebody is clothed, or see the pigmentation of their skin to automatically have to suspect them? That puts them in a tough place.

BROUN: Well, it does, Shannon. But the thing is, if a guy who's a young man robs a bank and goes and jumps in a blue Camaro with racing stripes and flames on it and goes running off, you say -- does the police put out an all-points bulletin saying, 'There's a person driving a motorized vehicle. Look for them.'

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The violent rhetoric so prevalent in the tea party crowd takes a dark turn when a person asks Rep. Paul Broun at a town hall who the person would be to shoot President Obama. Broun's response is almost as disturbing as the question being asked.

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."

Aued described the person who asked the question as "some old man" who "apparently was a huge fan" and had driven 75 miles to get to the meeting.

After laughing at the question, Broun reportedly said "there's a lot of frustration with this president."

"We're going to have an election next year," Broun said. "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."

A Secret Service spokesman tells Greg Sargent that the agency was aware of the incident, had taken appropriate steps, and now consider it a closed matter. A law enforcement source told Sargent that the Secret Service interviewed the person who made the comments who now regrets making a bad joke.

Conservative humor never does work, does it? There's not a lot I find redeemable about John McCain, but give the man his due, when the crazy Fox-informed supporter stood up and said that she thought Obama was an Arab, McCain did take the mike from her and chastise her for her remarks, calling Obama a decent family man. Contrast that to Broun choosing to laugh and basically validate the frustration of a man advocating assassination.

After 72 hours of the local press and the blogosphere starting to snowball the incident, Broun released a statement distancing himself from his initial actions:

"I deeply regret that this incident happened at all," Broun said in a statement. "Furthermore, I condemn all statements -- made in sincerity or jest -- that threaten or suggest the use of violence against the President of the United States or any other public official. Such rhetoric cannot and will not be tolerated." Broun also said his office "took action with the appropriate authorities."

Broun said that he "was stunned by the question and chose not to dignify it with a response; therefore, at that moment I moved on to the next person with a question."

Well, that's not exactly true, is it? It's hard to say that you didn't dignify it with a response when you in fact responded with a chuckle and an acknowledgment of a frustration level that made assassination an option to consider.

It is a shame that only months from the tragedy of the Gabby Giffords shooting, that any elected representative would appear so glib over a call for violence. But Brown isn't above making his own rather heated rhetoric either.

It's generous of Broun to recognize that suggesting assassination is a bridge too far, but it's not entirely clear where he draws the line. In the past few years, Broun has warned that members of the "socialistic elite" are plotting to declare martial law and repeatedly called for vigilance against his political opponents, whom he deems "domestic enemies":

BROUN: [Obama] has the three things necessary to establish an authoritarian government, and so we need to be ever vigilant because freedom is precious.

BROUN: Americans will be watching for Congress to fiercely defend this country against enemies, both foreign and domestic. Our foreign enemies may be easily identified and grab national headlines, but we must remain vigilant of our domestic enemies who ignore the original intent of the Constitution.

Moreover, Broun has warned that "people are gonna die" because of clean energy reforms, claimed the public health insurance option would "kill people," and compared the Affordable Care Act to the "Great War of Yankee Aggression."

In other words, there's no reason for Broun to be "stunned" by his constituent's venom. If anybody takes Broun's histrionics seriously — and he was reelected, after all — why wouldn't they think violence was necessary to maintain their liberty?

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Writing in Salon, Rick Perlstein examines "what Haley Barbour's amnesia tells us" about Southern conservatives' historical revisionism. But largely lost in the imbroglio over Barbour's literal white-washing of the Jim Crow era is that the Mississippi Governor and would-have-been 2012 White House hopeful has plenty of company among the leading lights of the Republican Party. From flying the Confederate flag to talking up secession and nullification, Republicans for years have been casually trafficking in antebellum nostalgia.

In May, Texas conservatives approved an overhaul of the state's textbooks which would remove the word "slave" from the term "slave trade." Of course, that omission was in keeping with two others, as Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and Mississippi's Barbour celebrated Confederate History Month in their respective states, each without mentioning slavery. As Barbour put it:

"To me it's a sort of feeling that it's just a nit. That it is not significant. It's trying to make a big deal out of something that doesn't matter for diddly."

As for Michael Steele and the Republican National Committee, they apparently considered "nits" like the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to Constitution unnecessary, at least judging from the RNC's May memo attacking Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan:

"Does Kagan Still View Constitution 'As Originally Drafted And Conceived' As 'Defective'?"

As the health care reform debate reached its climax in March, Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia was among those longing for the days of the ante bellum South. Missing the irony that health care is worst in those reddest of Southern states where Republicans poll best, Broun took to the House floor to show that he was still fighting the Civil War:

"If ObamaCare passes, that free insurance card that's in people's pockets is gonna be as worthless as a Confederate dollar after the War Between The States -- the Great War of Yankee Aggression."

If you thought you had heard that outdated term of Dixie revisionist history recently, you did. In February 2009, Missouri Republican Bryan Stevenson took exception to President Obama's support for the Freedom of Choice Act, legislation which would codify the reproductive rights protections of Roe v. Wade nationwide:

"What we are dealing with today is the greatest power grab by the federal government since the war of northern aggression."

That expression was also a favorite of former Senate Majority Leader and later Minority Whip (really, you can't make this up) Trent Lott. Lott was a speaker in 1992 at an event of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a successor to the White Citizens' Councils of Jim Crow days. Among its offerings in seething racial hatred is a "Wanted" poster of Abraham Lincoln. Lott's also offered his rebel yell in the virulently neo-Confederate Southern Partisan, where in 1984 he called the Civil War "the war of aggression." That was years before he lauded the legendary racist and 1948 Dixiecrat presidential candidate, Strom Thurmond:

"I want to say this about my state: when Strom Thurmond ran for President, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."

As Americans learned this week, Trent Lott is not the only Mississippi Republican to support groups like the CCC and honor the Confederate flag. Former Republican National Committee Chairman and now Governor Haley Barbour wore a lapel pin with the image during his 2002 campaigns for the state house - and to keep the CSA emblem flying over it. And as the photographs show, Barbour literally broke bread with CCC racists at a barbeque in 2003.

Another neocon (that is, neo-Confederate) is former Attorney General John Ashcroft.

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A modest proposal: no one displaying the Confederate flag gets to lecture any American about patriotism - ever. Ditto for anyone trafficking in Confederate nostalgia as a political strategy. Of course, that new red, white and blue rule would pose a problem for today's Republican Party. After all, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, the same man who delivered the GOP's response to President Obama's 2010 State of the Union, this week resurrected "Confederate History Month" in Richmond. And to be sure, when it comes to flying the Stars and Bars and talking up secession, nullification and "the war of Yankee aggression," McDonnell has plenty of company among the leading lights of the Republican Party.

Exhuming a ritual buried by his Democratic predecessors Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, McDonnell called on Virginians to celebrate the South's failure in the conflict bookended by Sumter and Appomattox, one he deemed "a four year war ... for independence." More shocking still, McDonnell's proclamation ignored the issue of slavery altogether because, he claimed, "I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia." Governor Jim Gilmore's 1999 declaration at least recognized slavery as the cause of the war that killed over 600,000 Americans, a point a humbled General Ulysses Grant made for posterity at Appomattox:

"I felt sad and depressed at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though their cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought."

Sadly, Bob McDonnell is far from alone among Republican leaders past and present reminding Americans that the old times there are not forgotten.

As the health care reform debate reached its climax in March, Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia was among those longing for the days of the ante bellum South. Missing the irony that health care is worst in those reddest of Southern states where Republicans poll best, Broun took to the House floor to show that he was still fighting the Civil War:

"If ObamaCare passes, that free insurance card that's in people's pockets is gonna be as worthless as a Confederate dollar after the War Between The States -- the Great War of Yankee Aggression."

If you thought you had heard that outdated term of Dixie revisionist history recently, you did. In February 2009, Missouri Republican Bryan Stevenson took exception to President Obama's support for the Freedom of Choice Act, legislation which codify the reproductive rights protections of Roe v. Wade nationwide:

"What we are dealing with today is the greatest power grab by the federal government since the war of northern aggression."

That expression was also a favorite of former Senate Majority Leader and later Minority Whip (really, you can't make this up) Trent Lott.

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And here we have another nut job Republican who claims health care reform will destroy America. Where's the outrage by the Villagers over these statements?

Media Matters:

It's an impressive feat, but there may not be a Republican member of Congress who has been more openly scornful of President Obama's plans for health care reform than Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA).

In July, Broun declared that the public insurance option "is gonna kill people." Later in the month, he argued that "ObamaCare" would "give every single one of those illegal aliens health insurance." At a town hall meeting in September, Broun literally walked away from a constituent who couldn't get health coverage after telling him, "If you have a suggestion, send it to me." And, just a few weeks ago, he introduced "alternative" legislation that would eliminate Medicare altogether.

Yesterday, Broun escalated his attacks on the Democratic reform bill, saying that its passage "destroy America as we know it today."

Right -- if a liberal like Grayson calls out Republicans (who have no health care plan), they get their freak on. But I guess they have already been immunized to conservative insanity.

Oh, and we have Rep. Gohmert saying this: Dems Would Allow Seniors To "Die Off More Quickly"

This is standard conservative behavior that never gets mentioned by the media. It only comes up when a liberal is attacked and then they spend 24-48 hours to defend themselves and are forced to use these outrageous statement made by Republicans. And of course they have no traction, because of the defensive position the media puts liberals in.