Georgia’s Bob Johnson (“Doctor. Army Ranger. The Christian Conservative.”) is running in a crowded Republican field, in a very red district, for a seat in Congress. So when he prefaced a comment with “this is going to sound outrageous,” and then went on to talk about welcoming a terrorist attack, “truly,” he probably should have known it wasn’t going to come out right.
It didn’t, Politico reports:
“Now this is going to sound outrageous, I’d rather see another terrorist attack, truly I would, than to give up my liberty as an American citizen,” he said, according to a video clip obtained by POLITICO. “Give me liberty or give me death. Isn’t that what Patrick Henry said at the founding of our republic?”
He criticized the TSA for “indoctrinating generations of Americans to walk through a line and be prodded and probed by uniform personnel, agents of the government, like sheep.”
Yep, sounds outrageous. Nope, he didn’t mean “truly I would” literally, although he might as well have said literally.
“As a 26 year Army Ranger, head and neck surgeon and even a Christian medical missionary, I’ve sworn my life to defending this country and keeping people safe,” Johnson said in another statement that sounds outrageous. “And as a Constitutional conservative, it angers me that we are giving up our liberty to the bureaucratic TSA and spying on our own people in the name of false security and that has to stop.”
“In the heat of the moment,” he added, “while making the point that I would much rather fight the enemy than our federal government, I said something stupid and should have chosen my words more carefully.” Truly.
