Week of 07/23/2012

Texas Congressman Brings Shame To America
– by David Matthews 2

It is said that the state of Texas makes everything thing bigger. Big hair, big hats, big boots, big homes, big steaks…

And when it comes to politics, Texas doesn’t scrimp. They stick us with the biggest egos, the biggest attitudes, and the biggest pains.

Bad enough that we had to deal with eight years of the Bush Imperium, saddled with two wars, and the biggest war debt imaginable under President George W. Bush, formerly the Governor of Texas. A debt, by the way, which was then passed to Barack Obama to deal with and for the GOP to then blame because their egos refused to accept responsibility for any of it. Bad enough that we had to deal with the corrupt antics of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, also from Texas, and who also helped with that war debt.

Now we have to deal with the antics of another Texas politician… Congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas.

Mr. Gohmert has a problem. He sees enemies in every shadow and under every rock. He sees armies of pregnant Muslim women flying to America under so-called “birth tourism packages” just so they could deliver babies in the United States, and in twenty years supposedly have armies of “American terrorists”. And if you ask him for proof, he’ll just repeat the whole thing again in a louder tone. Just ask Anderson Cooper about that if you don’t believe me.

Proof? What proof? He’s Louie Gohmert of Texas, a member of the United States House of Representatives! He doesn’t need proof! He just demands that you accept what he says without question. And if you don’t then he’ll repeat it even louder, because that apparently is what you do in Texas when people don’t believe you. You just repeat it in an even bigger and louder voice.

Sort of reminds me of another overbearing politician from Texas. This one would make all sorts of claims about Cuban hit squads and political “dirty tricks” but would not offer a single piece of proof; only his word that these things exist. You may have heard of him… his name was H. Ross Perot, and for a brief time he was almost considered a serious contender for the White House in the early 1990’s.

Oh, but don’t presume that Mr. Gohmert is an Islamophobe! He’ll tell you straight out that there are plenty of pictures out there on the “internets” of him being buddy-buddy with plenty of Muslims! Well, according to him, they exist. Just like the scores of pregnant Muslin women flying in on “birth tourism packages” to make future “American terrorists”.

There’s a word to describe this kind of person, and it is the common name of the human orifice where fecal matter comes out. And apparently it is the one thing that Texas knows has to produce larger and more prodigiously than any other state in the country.

But apparently having a bug up his butt about Muslims following the ravings of a cleric is not good enough for Congressman Gohmert. Now he has to spout off jihadist rhetoric like one of those Muslim clerics.

In the early hours of Friday morning, a lone gunman opened fire in a crowded theater in Aurora, Colorado. Seventy-one people were shot, twelve people killed.

At a time when the shooter was not yet apprehended or any kind of motives for the shooting were evident, Congressman Gohmert took it upon himself to proclaim that the massacre was the result of what he describes as the “ongoing attacks of Judeo-Christian beliefs”.

"People say ... where was God in all of this?" he 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."

Did you get that? Congressman Gohmert believes that twelve people are dead and over seventy are injured because “God” supposedly didn’t protect them out of some perceived concept of petty vanity!

This is a country that has more churches in any given community than it has fast food franchises and big-box superstores. Tens of thousands of different variations and interpretations of Christianity alone, not to mention a special White House branch created by the previous President and sustained by the current one, and an exclusive and elite lobbying service on C-Street, and yet somehow that isn’t enough for Congressman Louie Gohmert’s version of God?

What’s next, Congressman? Do we complete the trip back to 1692 and start burning witches at the stake again because the crops were bad? Will that somehow appease your version of God, or will we really have to go “Old Testament” and start sacrificing animals at the altar?

To add insult to injury, Congressman Gohmert then spewed forth the asinine idea that this tragedy could have been prevented if someone watching the movie in the theater had a gun!

Perhaps lost to the Congressman is the fact that the movie featured in this tragedy was “The Dark Knight Rises”, the story of a masked vigilante who, as a child, lost his parents at the hands of a criminal, and thus seeks to make the city safe so no child would ever lose their parents because of some thug with a gun. Given the established fact that the legend of Batman is not only one of a crime victim but also someone that despises guns, who in their right mind would actually show up to a movie about Batman with a gun?

You know, I expect this kind of mindless, opportunistic, attention-starved narcissism from the evangelicals like Pat Robertson and his ilk. People who are to this day trying to re-write history to suit their own distorted visions.

But let’s get brutally honest here… Louie Gohmert is not supposed to be an evangelical minister trying to channel the spirit of Cotton Mather to the self-righteous Puritans looking for witches to burn. He is supposed to be a member of the United States House of Representatives! He is supposed to show a sound and deliberate mind when hashing through legislation dealing with crime and civil liberties. His words on this subject do not reflect well on his credibility as a member of that legislature!

Indeed, this kind of narcissistic jerk-jerk reaction to a tragedy at a time when all of the facts were still not in place is not only a black mark on his personal credibility, but also an embarrassment to the nation as a whole.

Even his Texas-sized ego is too big for him to own up to his own words. Instead, he now claims that his words were “taken out of context”. Apparently the one thing that Texas doesn’t make bigger than anyplace else is character.

I hereby propose that, much like was done with former GOP congressman Rick Santorum, we should Google-bomb the name “Gohmert” so that all future references point to the definition of the word “asinine”. Then, at least, there would be no question whatsoever what kind of person represents the State of Texas in Washington.

While I would otherwise hope that the voters in Congressman Gohmert’s district would be smart enough to show him and his ignorance the door this coming November, I would be honestly surprised if they did. Someone like Mr. Gohmert doesn’t get where he is today based on sound and rational voters, and since Texas doesn’t do anything small, one can only conclude that the same applies to the lack of voter intelligence.