U.S. Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA), a leader in the battle to defeat health reform, sounded an odd note against the legislation yesterday, likening the move to expand health care to the the war to free the slaves, another “Yankee aggression,” he suggested. Progressive websites are highlighting the speech as a “reactionary” over-the-top “diatribe” that signals desperation.
Watch Broun deliver the speech, though, and see the wry smile that accompanies the bombastic metaphor. GOP “visceral voters” may take up the language as legitimate, but Broun knows he was actually comparing his own wing-nut overstretched rhetoric on health reform to the wing-nut rhetoric of his forebears, the Old South defenders of the “peculiar institution” who saw the Civil War as the act of an overreaching president trampling on state’s rights, defiling the Constitution and destroying Southern marketplace plantation capitalism and god’s natural order. Broun seems to sardonically acknowledge what side of history he’s coming down on and accepts his fate as part of a long Southern tradition!
Here’ Broun on Capitol Hill waving his rebel flag:
“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.”
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