Just when the horror of Aurora threatened to overwhelm me, East Texas congressman Louie Gohmert provided some much needed comic relief by explaining why it all happened.
“People say … where was God in all of this?” Gohmert said. “We’ve threatened high school graduation participations, if they use God’s name, they’re going to be jailed … I mean that kind of stuff. Where was God? What have we done with God? We don’t want him around. I kind of like his protective hand being present.”
It takes a full-body commitment to stupid to link prayer at graduation to a massacre in a cinema before the families had even buried their dead. But we’re talking about a guy who compared letting gays and lesbians serving in the military to putting “the disabled on the front lines” and likened Obama to Hitler for making BP pay to clean up their oil spill. A “measured response” isn’t exactly Gohmert’s strong suit.
A while back there was a congressman in the Texas Panhandle who tried to explain to an angry town hall audience that he voted for Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax increase because he had considered all the facts. Replied one of his angry constituents, “We don’t send you to Washington to make intelligent decisions. We send you there to represent us!”
This is how taxpayers end up paying the salaries of yappy little congressmen like Louie Gohmert. Sure, he poops on the carpet, but he’s too dim to hate and runs into walls so enthusiastically that you love the poor guy a little. It’s hard not to feel affection for a politician who seems so happy to say this on national TV: “With all due deference to Forrest Gump who said life is like a box of chocolates, it’s really more like a jar of jalapeños—what you do today can burn you in the rear.”
Gohmert is a free-range lunatic, unburdened by the moderating effects of wise counsel. No sticking to the focus-grouped message for Gohmert. Damn the talking points, full stupid ahead.
Crazy Uncle Louie tends toward the alarmist wing of the asylum and is something of an expert in crackpot terrorist schemes. He accused Obama of “trying to create a new jobs bill by allowing terrorism back in New York” and of intervening in Libya in order to deplete our military—stay with me here—so he could call up the secret military that was created by Obamacare.
He made the news earlier that week by joining Michele Bachmann in accusing the Muslim Brotherhood of infiltrating the State Department, but he hastened to reassure folks that he wasn’t anti-Muslim, per se. “You follow me around the world. You see me hugging Muslims around the world, because the ones I hug are our friends,” said Gohmert. You never saw Joe McCarthy hugging friendly Commies, now did you?
Gohmert is the one who alerted America of the danger of terror babies. Bravely ignoring the absolute lack of evidence, Gohmert says that pregnant Muslims are coming here to have their babies and taking their progeny home and raising them as little terrorists with American passports who are free to come back and kill us later. We’re in trouble, shouts Gohmert, although the “explosions will not happen for 10, 15, 20 years.” Kubrick never imagined anything that nuts.
Gohmert’s observations on the environment have been truly inspired, if occasionally off-color. On the House floor, he called the Clean Energy bill “crap & trade” and once justified building the trans-Alaska pipeline because it would help caribou have more sex.
“So when they want to go on a date, they invite each other to head over to the pipeline. So my real concern now … if oil stops running through the pipeline … do we need a study to see how adversely the caribou would be affected if that warm oil ever quit flowing?” asked Gohmert.
I can’t make sense of why that idiot killed those poor people, but I’m grateful to Rep. Gohmert for making nonsense of it. By injecting a national day of mourning with his poisonous strain of politics, Gohmert allowed me to laugh through my tears. And if laughter is the best medicine, Congressman Gohmert should be the Surgeon General.
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© Copyright 2012 Jason Stanford, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.
Jason Stanford is a Democratic consultant who has helped elect or re-elect more than two dozen Members of Congress. He lives in Austin, Texas. You can reach him at stanford@oppresearch.com or follow him on Twitter @jasstanford.
