ACTUALLY, NO, PAUL, YOU'RE NOT THE FIRST IDIOT TO SAY THIS

The Republican Party is reinventing itself, or so they tell us, but if you want to win a Republican primary, you still want to do what Congressman Paul Broun is doing in an effort to defeat replace Saxby Chambliss and be the 2014 GOP Senate candidate in Georgia:

... In a letter to potential contributors, which can be read here, the Athens congressman burnishes his resume in his traditional, confrontational manner. Some selected paragraphs:

As a Member of the House of Representatives for the last few years, I have fought tooth-and-nail against President Obama's agenda at every turn.

I was the first Member of Congress to call him a socialist who embraces Marxist-Leninist policies like government control of health care and redistribution of wealth....

Well, Broun did call Obama both a socialist and a Nazi in November 2008:

"It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he's the one who proposed this national security force," Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. "I'm just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may -- may not, I hope not -- but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism."

Broun cited a July speech by Obama that has circulated on the Internet in which the then-Democratic presidential candidate called for a civilian force to take some of the national security burden off the military.

"That's exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it's exactly what the Soviet Union did," Broun said. "When he's proposing to have a national security force that's answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he's showing me signs of being Marxist."

But as Raw Story notes, Congressman George Voinovich said of Obama a month earlier, "He is left of Teddy Kennedy. With all due respect, the man is a socialist."

And John McCain -- hey, the Senate is part of Congress -- had this exchange with Fox's Chris Wallace, also in October 2008:

WALLACE: ... Do you think that Senator Obama is a socialist? Do you think that his plans are socialism?

MCCAIN: I think his plans are redistribution of the wealth. He said it himself, "We need to spread the wealth around." Now, that's one of...

WALLACE: Is that socialism?

MCCAIN: That's one of the tenets of socialism.

But the winner by a long shot, as far as I can tell, is Alaska congressman Don Young. He called Obama a socialist in February 2008:

Young said both Clinton and Obama are both socialist and believe in socialism. "They say they believe in democracy but if you listen to what they say they believe in the government running everything, taking from those that have achieved and giving to those who haven't achieved and that's socialism," said Young.

Maybe we need a list of Republicans who haven't called Obama a socialist. Seems as if it would be a pretty short list.