I’m not Barack Obama’s biggest fan. His administration has been a sore disappointment to those of us who believed he would change Washington’s culture of sleaze.

I like his congressional allies—especially the ever-bumbling Harry Reid—even less. I thought the stimulus package and the health care bill were mammoth mistakes, and I plan on voting for Marco Rubio, the Republican candidate for the Senate in my home state of Florida, precisely because he has articulately opposed such big-government boondoggles.

I hope Republicans win back one or both houses of Congress in a few weeks, forcing Obama to rein in his liberal policy agenda. If by some miracle the Democrats manage to hold onto both chambers, I’ll be sorely disappointed. I think many other conservatives will be, too.

I know Stephen Broden will be, because he said as much on television. But then Broden, a Dallas pastor who is running for Congress on the Republican ticket, went six steps further and said that if Republicans don’t win back Congress, a violent overthrow of the government would be one of the options “on the table.”

Broden quickly backtracked by saying that a violent revolt “is not the first option.”  I’m so relieved.

I’ve always assumed that those who want to overthrow the government are loners on the fringe of society, living in the woods with stockpiles of food and water and talking to their cats.

I don’t expect the two major political parties to always nominate candidates that are paragons of virtue and intelligence—after all, the Democratic Party nominated a guy facing felony obscenity charges to be the next United States Senator from the state of South Carolina. Yet, there should be a baseline standard to which we hold our political candidates. I don’t think opposing violent revolution is asking too much.

People are getting more and more cataclysmic in their predictions about the state of this country’s government. People had all kinds of crazy theories about why George Bush invaded Iraq; a handful of zanies even thought he might have had a hand in 9/11.

But, Bush had it easy compared to the nutty things people think about Obama, including that his birth certificate was forged almost fifty years ago just in case he ever decided to run for president. And now a man of God and congressional candidate says it might be time to rise up in arms against the federal government.

To be honest, I didn’t even know who was running against Stephen Broden in the upcoming election until Google told me that it’s a woman named Eddie Bernice Johnson. I have no idea what she stands for, but I sure do hope she wins.

Nathaniel French is a senior theater major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].