Blake Aued, who blogs at the Athens (Ga.) Banner Herald, attended a Tuesday townhall meeting hosted by Rep. Paul Broun (GA-10), a Congressman who has said he doesn't know if Barack Obama is a citizen or a Christian, but he does know that the President wants to impose a Marxist dictatorship.

The main topic Tuesday was Broun's plans to use his chairmanship of the Science, Space and Technology Committee's subcommittee on investigation and oversight to hold hearings into "opposing views" about global warming. That's because Broun is another one of those Congresspeople who claims climate change is a "hoax." But while he discussed that particular idiocy with the passion of a creationist describing Noah's feeding of dinosaurs on the Ark, his essential failure at the meeting had nothing to do with his scientific IQ.

It was instead his totally unacceptable response to a member of the audience who had won the right to ask the first question by virtue of having driven the farthest to get to the Oglethorpe County Commission chambers where the townhall was being held. That questioner asked:

"Who is going to shoot Obama?"

It drew a big laugh, wrote Aued.

A. big. laugh.

If Paul Broun were a stand-up guy, a righteous one, a tribune of the people offering his counsel on the great issues of the day, he would have said something morally relevant at this juncture. Something that might have started off with, say:

"Shame on you, sir, for making a joke about the assassination of the President, and shame on you all for laughing about it. It makes my skin crawl to know that some of my constituents think it would be a good thing for someone to shoot the President. It makes me want to ring up the cops so they can check to see whether you, sir, are a dolt or deranged or if, perhaps, you have something more ambitious in mind than squeezing off an assassination joke like a fart in a bar. Shame on you."

But Broun isn't a stand-up guy. So he said nothing helpful in the face of the questioner's little addition to the nation's growing shit-pile of eliminationist talk. The Two-Minutes Hate now shrieks at us 24/7/365, amplified in coded and uncoded fashion by the likes of Glenn Beck, Michael Savage and dozens of wannabes on hundreds of radio stations. Instead of confronting, Broun enabled:

The thing is, I know there’s a lot of frustration with this president. We’re going to have an election next year. 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.

Is there video? I don't know. But let me just guess that the Congressman delivered the first line of his reply - the sickening acknowledgment that the questioner supposedly has a point - with a smile. Maybe even with a bit of twinkle in his eye. Whether Broun smiled or not, what he said doesn't rank anywhere near high enough to be labeled disgraceful. It was a cowardly display. As if to say: I know how you feel, sir, but hopefully, nobody will have to shoot him if we beat him at the polls.

When I was a boy growing up in Georgia, my teachers called the Civil War the War of Northern Aggression. At the end of that war, in which the state had been laid waste, thousands of dead were fresh in their graves and there was thick fear of what the future would bring, no great Georgia hurrah rose up because John Wilkes Booth put his Deringer to the back of Abraham Lincoln's head and brought the hammer down. There are no monuments to Booth in Georgia, and there's only ever been a minuscule one in the entire South. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the most prominent nightrider of the Ku Klux Klan, the racist murderers who carried the Civil War beyond Appomattox, has statues and monuments all over the place, even a state park. But not Booth.

These days, in Oglethorpe County, at least, some people's public behavior seems to indicate that they would put up a monument to an assassin of Barack Obama. And their wretched excuse for a Congressman wouldn't even call them on it.