GOP congressional candidates say Obama and his voters are the biggest threats to national security.

By Zaid Jilani One of the right’s biggest electoral targets for 2010 is Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA), who recently condemned the Senate as “spineless” for being too hesitant in passing clean energy legislation and has been threatened with being burned in effigy by the local tea party movement. This weekend, seven Republicans vying for the GOP congressional nomination to run against Perriello debated a variety of issues at a forum sponsored by the Lynchburg Tea Party. At one point, the candidates were all asked what they viewed as the primary national security threat to the United States. One candidate, Jim McKelvey, said it was the Obama administration; another candidate, Laurence Verga, said it was the voters who elected Obama, who he described as motivated by “political correctness run awry“:

Earlier, in response to a question about the No. 1 threat to national security, McKelvey got a round of cheers by saying, “The present administration is the biggest threat.”

Verga said the biggest threat is the Americans who voted the Obama administration into office. “That was political correctness gone awry,” Verga said. “There is a global jihad against the United States,” Verga said, “and we need to stand up to Iran with our allies and stop what they are doing.”

Reflecting on the debate, blogger Waldo Jaquith, who lives in Perriello’s district, writes, “Let’s just take a moment to consider that Verga meant by that. ‘Political correctness’ is conservative-speak for ’supporting minorities.’ There are many types of minorities, of course, but President Obama is only one kind: black. So what Laurence Verga is saying is that Obama is only president because he’s black. 69,456,897 Americans—52.9% of us—tossed national security aside because we supported President Obama over Sen. John McCain merely because Obama is a black man and, therefore, not a real American, so he can be known to be secretly undermining national security. Obama lacks other qualifications, but 48.29% of Fifth District voters are such morons that we voted for the man because we are, at heart, racists. Verga is not a racist, of course, he’s just keeping it real.”