Sometimes, it just feels like the GOP never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity—not that Pennsylvania's Senate race had presented them with an especially good one, but now it looks even worse. On Thursday, CNN reported that GOP Rep. Lou Barletta, who is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination to take on Democratic Sen. Bob Casey this fall, conducted an interview in 2006 with a publication called the American Free Press that calls Holocaust a hoax and 9/11 a "Jewish plot." The following year, Barletta headlined a rally where one of the speakers and musical performers was a "patriot rock" singer named Paul Topete, whom the Anti-Defamation League says is a Holocaust denier.
Barletta fell in with such lovely folks because, at the time, he'd become notorious in his harsh crackdown on illegal immigration as mayor of the small city of Hazelton, making him very much a proto-Trump xenophobe. As such, Barletta became something of a sought-after celebrity in nativist circles, which a spokesman, Jon Anzur, pointed to as he tried to explain away these deeply unpleasant associations. "As the mayor of a small city, Lou didn't have the resources or staff to screen everyone who asked him questions," said Anzur.
Those two examples, though, are just the worst of the worst. Barletta's palled around with lots of other scuzz, reports CNN, including after he was elected to Congress in 2010—and therefore had sufficient staff to vet anyone who wanted to talk to him. Yet that didn't stop him, for instance, from speaking at a 2011 workshop held by a journal called The Social Contract, whose editor once declared that "Islam itself is the problem" and "called for the end of all Muslim immigration to the U.S."
Barletta doesn't appear to have issued any sort of apology for involving himself with people and groups like these, nor has he even said he was wrong to do so. Anzur, the spokesman, would only say that Barletta condemns "hate, bigotry, and racial supremacy in all its forms." He sure has a funny way of condemning such things, though.