A Republican candidate for the U.S. House in Georgia said he’d rather see another terrorist attack than continue to submit to airport searches by the TSA, though he later backed away from those remarks.
“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,” Bob Johnson, a doctor and candidate in Georgia’s first district said, according to a video obtained by Politico. “Give me liberty or give me death. Isn’t that what Patrick Henry said at the founding of our republic?”
Johnson said that the TSA has been “indoctrinating generations of Americans to walk through a line and be prodded and probed by uniform personnel, agents of the government, like sheep.”
In a statement to Politico, Johnson apologized for and clarified his remarks.
“In the heat of the moment, 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,” he said. “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.”
Johnson is running for the seat currently held by Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA), who is running for the open Georgia seat in the U.S. Senate.
Image via Dr. Bob Johnson for Congress on Facebook
