It seems like every week brings an account of a new despicable Republican politician, from New Hampshire Republican Martin Harty's call to let "defective people" die, to Todd Akin's vile comments on "legitimate rape", to Paul Ryan's staged photo-op at a soup kitchen. (Ok, maybe that last one was more pathetic than despicable; certainly funnier that the others, in a tragicomic sort of way.)
Here's this week's contender for the GOP delenda est prize: Arkansas Representative Loy Mauch. Before this insane neo-Confederate managed to round up enough ignorant and brain-damaged people to elect him to office, he was a regular in the letters page of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Arkansas Times blogger Max Brantley has gone through the archives to find some of Mauch's gems:
... If slavery were so God-awful, why didn’t Jesus or Paul condemn it, why was it in the Constitution and why wasn’t there a war before 1861?
The South has always stood by the Constitution and limited government. When one attacks the Confederate Battle Flag, he is certainly denouncing these principles of government as well as Christianity....
To those of us who actually know our history, Lee will be mentioned in the same breath as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, while Goering will be equated with Lincoln, Josef Stalin and Karl Marx.
...
The Confederate flag to me is not only a symbol of our brief period of independence and our loyalty to the 1789 Constitution, but also a symbol of Christian liberty vs. the new world order.