Congressman Paul Broun, Athens’ Republican delegate in the United States House of Representatives, has demonstrated yet again that he is a ludicrous embarrassment to the institution in which he serves and the electorate he purports to represent. 

The latest outrage in his parody of a political career occurred on the floor of the great legislative body he has befouled since 2007.

WIDENER

During a debate on health care legislation, Mr. Broun babbled the following: “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.”

It’s hardly worth mentioning Mr. Broun’s facts are wrong about the Democrats’ health care plan — there will be no “free insurance card” — because his view of the Civil War is so egregious. 

The readers of this newspaper don’t need a review of the most grievous and menacing hour in our nation’s history, but Mr. Broun evidently does. 

Using states’ rights as a rhetorical instrument, the Confederacy attempted to destroy the United States by ripping it apart through acts of treason, sabotage, secession and warfare, all to preserve racist slave labor. For this he blames the North.

Now Mr. Broun, as a member of a political party whose first and greatest president was martyred while fighting to preserve the union and abolish slavery, has the effrontery to use neo-Confederate language to denounce a black president’s well-intentioned — if ill-conceived — health care proposal. 

That he should invoke an event most saliently identified with racism and secessionism to argue against a wholly unrelated matter like health care suggests he harbors a dark and pathological paranoia.

Mr. Broun has a history of making hysterical comments. On Nov. 10, 2008, he told the Associated Press that President Obama’s plan to expand the role of civilians in national security and diplomacy was “exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did.”

He continued, “You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I’m not comparing him to Adolf Hitler. What I’m saying is there is the potential of going down that road.”

These statements epitomize Mr. Broun’s thoughts and methods; his staggering historical imbecility leads him to offensive and indecent conclusions. 

He says he is not comparing Mr. Obama to the Nazi dictator, yet in the next sentence says there is a potential that they are comparable because he may lead the U.S. “down that road.”

Since the president has not engineered the burning down of Congress, opened a concentration camp and sent his political opponents there, or instigated an atmosphere of xenophobia, racism and intimidation, Mr. Broun should issue a long-overdue retraction. The slithering non-apology he cravenly made last year was utterly insufficient.

Mr. Broun routinely encourages irrational bigotries and unfounded fears. On March 4, when Sirius XM radio host Pete Dominick asked if Mr. Obama was a Christian and an American citizen, Mr. Broun answered, “I don’t know.” 

His office later explained “it wasn’t fair to speculate” about the president’s religion and citizenship. This is racism — cynical, filthy, scandalous racism, and it stinks to the heavens.

If the fires of racial animosity are not alight in Mr. Broun, then he should explain his propensity to phrase political disagreements with Mr. Obama and the Democrats in racial and neo-Confederate language.

I don’t expect an intellectually honest answer — just more wild accusations, outlandish historical analogies and a continued affinity for extremist groups like the John Birch Society. In that case, he must be expelled from office at the polls this November.

— Andrew Widener is a senior from Sharpsburg majoring in international affairs