Senate candidate and Rep. Paul Broun (R-Athens) went on CNN Tuesday to repeat his talking points about not defaulting on the national debt if the debt ceiling isn’t raised (here’s why that’s not true), his bill to deregulate health care and turn Medicare into a voucher system, and his insistence that “Obamacare is going to destroy everything we know as a nation.”
Then host Wolf Blitzer does something national political reporters so rarely do: his job. He presses Broun on what circumstances he’d vote for a debt-ceiling hike; Broun dodges.
Blitzer also asks Broun about his quote in the National Review that “America is going to be destroyed by Obamacare.”
“America is going to be destroyed—this country of ours—by Obamacare?” he asks.
Broun backtracks somewhat: “It’s going to destroy our economy,” he says. “It’s going to push us into total economic collapse.”
But the “destroy America” quote jibes with what Broun has said in the past about President Obama declaring himself a dictator and turning a Bush Administration volunteer group into his own private Gestapo. He doesn’t just think Obamacare will wreck the economy, as far-fetched as that is. He believes (or is cynically implying to the Republican base that he believes) that Obama is actually going to bring about a revolution that ends the United States of America in the sense that it will cease to exist.
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