Rep. Allen West (R-FL) has done it again.
At a campaign town hall event on Tuesday, the Palm Beach Post reports, West declared that he’s “heard” that up to 80 House Democrats are members of the Communist Party. However, he would not name any specific people.
West also got in a verbal shot against President Obama, declaring that Obama is too scared to debate him:
“I really wish that, standing here before you, was Allen West and President Obama,” West said. “We could have a simple discussion. But that ain’t ever gonna happen.”
“Why not?” an audience member asked.
“Cuz he was too scared!” West responded in a mocking voice.
This is just the latest in a long line of provocative statements that West has made, which have helped to build up his notoriety –Â and his campaign coffers. In addition, Sarah Palin and Herman Cain have each suggested in recent days that West should be the Vice Presidential nominee on the 2012 Republican ticket.
West became a star of conservative political circles, and subsequently launched his political career, after his military career ended when he fired a pistol next to the head of an Iraqi policeman during an interrogation. West said this was done in order to stop an impending attack on his unit, but no evidence of such a plan was found based on the policeman’s coerced confession.
Since then, West has become known for declaring that America’s enemy is not just militant radical Islamism, but Islam itself.
Following his election to Congress in 2010, and a controversy involving anti-government comments by a woman who had been his first choice for chief of staff, he said that in Congress he would remain focused that “this liberal, progressive, socialist agenda, this left-wing, vile, vicious, despicable machine that’s out there is soundly brought to its knees.”
He has also called President Obama, whom he makes sure to refer to as “Barack Hussein Obama,” a “a low-level socialist agitator,” and he responded to an attack by DNC Chair and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz by sending her a letter that declared she had “proven repeatedly that you are not a Lady, therefore, shall not be afforded due respect from me!”
He has also said that Democratic Party has created what he calls a “21st-century plantation” over black voters, with appointed African-American politicians to act as “overseers” — the men who committed the day-to-day atrocities of ruling over slaves in the antebellum South. “So I’m here as the modern-day Harriet Tubman, to kind of lead people on the Underground Railroad, away from that plantation into a sense of sensibility.”
West has further called upon military generals to resign their posts, rather than follow the orders of the Obama administration’s recently announced reorganization of the Armed Forces: “And they have to be very careful about blindly following a Commander-in-Chief that really does not have the best intent for our military.”
(h/t Huffington Post)
