As Keith Brekhus reported here yesterday, Louie Gohmert (R-TX) has announced his intentions to dethrone Speaker of the House John Boehner. And oh boy are the extremists happy. You can’t turn around without seeing one of them do a happy dance. After all, as Joseph Farah writes at World Net Daily, “a vote for Boehner is a vote for Obama.”
Such talk sounds absolutely crazy from a liberal perspective. Boehner is another Obama? Really?
Yes, you see Boehner, like Obama, is a dictator. Gohmert says so, and Farah agrees:
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John Boehner has served in this role for the last four years. He has accommodated Obama in every way imaginable with his leadership. He has arm-twisted Republican votes. He has threatened opposition. He has controlled his caucus like Kim Jong-un, without the charisma.
Gohmert, on the other hand, is a swell guy:
It’s as simple as this, now that Rep. Louie Gohmert, an honest, straightforward, principled conservative, has thrown his hat into the ring: Who would provide better leadership of the House – Boehner or Gohmert?
Seems such a simple choice when you look at it so dishonestly, doesn’t it? I mean, seriously, Gohmert “honest” and “principled”?
And Farah is far from alone in his celebratory stance, as witnessed by Sean Hannity, who tweeted:
“@3462727: Yea !!!! Your Buddy, Veteran, great American Louie Gohmert challenging Boehner for Speaker of the House! YES!” I support Louie!
— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) January 4, 2015
“Great American?” Are we talking about the same Gohmert?
FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe said Sunday:
With a growing Republican majority in the House and a historically high number of liberty-voting fiscal conservatives within it, there is an urgent need replace Speaker Boehner with fresh, bold leadership that better represents the views of the whole caucus.
I did not know “bold” and “crazy” were synonymous…
Ben Shapiro, senior editor at Breitbart.com, is just as effusive:
Louie Gohmert is an honorable man doing a deeply honorable thing in challenging John Boehner.
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) January 4, 2015
A deeply honorable man? It is almost as if Republicans are living in a parallel universe. We have seen John McCain say Gohmert is basically an idiot, after all. And this isn’t just McCain’s opinion. It has been proven many times over.
After all, this is the same Louie Gohmert who:
- Said gay soldiers in ancient Greece just wanted massages, that “if you’re sitting around getting massages all day ready to go into a big, planned battle, then you’re not going to last very long”;
- This past July, Gohmert, who hasn’t actually seen God, attempted to disprove atheism by pointing to something somebody else, who also hadn’t actually ever seen God, once told him;
- Said without Jesus Americans are going to hell. Isn’t that a pastor’s worry, or even perhaps your own, rather than that of our elected representatives?;
- Thinks Congress is a church council;
- Condemned of President Obama for failing to use the Old Testament as a guide to his policies;
- Wanted to defund the Executive Branch as a means of punishing Obama for not doing what Republicans want him to do;
- Wanted Attorney General Eric Holder arrested for failing to share his delusions (and probably as revenge for Holder daring to be smarter than him).
- On one day said that all this immigration is an Obama plot to keep Republicans out of office;
- And a day later said that Latinos will vote Republican because they believe in God;
- Wants Obama to “do what Woodrow Wilson did” and invade Mexico;
- Said the Second Amendment is there to protect us from Sharia Law (actually, that would be the First Amendment).
I’ll just add to this list Gohmert saying in January that the GOP is “a big national organization of corporations” that “has declared war on us.” Maybe he forgot all that corporate money that created the Tea Party itself?
I have a difficult time looking at this collection of Gohmert outbursts and seeing somebody who is “honest, straightforward, principled, great, and honorable.”
On the contrary, the man sounds barely sane.
McCain got it in one: the man is an idiot.
No wonder Tea Baggers love him. Even so, the Washington Post’s Sean Sullivan calls Gohmert a “long shot.”
John Boehner may be ineffectual and dishonest and lack integrity, but Gohmert makes him look like an honest-to-God statesman.
For the record, Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL) has also announced his intention to unseat Boehner, and Reaganite radio host Mark Levin tweeted,
Yoho in too (the goal is to deny Boehner about 30 GOP votes) http://t.co/Et7Juyh1n0
— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) January 4, 2015
At this point, I would guess that if the wing nuts deprive Boehner of 30 votes (is that equivalent to 30 pieces of silver?) that they’ve also deprived him of about 30 functioning brain cells.
In the Republican Party of 2015, thirty brain cells is the difference between self-serving and Texas crazy.
I suspect if Gohmert should succeed that America might come to miss weepy orange man John Boehner.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
