Saturday, June 26, 2010
Nip it in the Womb
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), who easily ranks in any top ten craziest Congressperson list, is now alleging that terrorist cells are exploiting America's birthright citizenship to create a new class of terrorist babies with American citizenship. It seems to me that the only way to stem this threat is to capture all immigrant mothers, and force them to abort their kids (the Executive has an inherent power to assassinate American citizens to be if necessary for our national defense, after all). Otherwise we're just training the next generation of terrorists (it's unbelievably to me that this argument is not actually a one-off).
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Anything is possible, I suppose, but I am less curious as to what prompted this political animal to make his weird statement and more interested in his constituents. What sort of people would elect and reelect such a person to Congress?
Texans?
There are Texans and Texans. His Texans must be quite something. If I had the energy right now, I'd look up the details of his district.
Also, reminder that half the country basically believes that prisoners transferred from Guantanamo to any domestic prison will suddenly gain laser vision and the ability to leap razor wire fences. Or at least that's what you'd think to hear the "national security concern" brouhaha on that issue. Rationality got out and walked a long time ago. If this seems any more bizarre it's only from the instinctive dissonance we feel for concepts like "terrorist babies."
Gohmert represents the district in which I grew up and where my parents still live. I think his campaign against our prior (Democratic) Congressman was the first local election since my father became a citizen in which Dad did not contribute money to the Republican candidate. Dad is understandably made nervous by the anti-immigrant branch of the GOP, but he loves the Bushes.
Being overtly anti-immigrant isn't all that common in Texas. I don't know if it's because we've had cities that were *always* majority Latino (e.g. San Antonio, El Paso), but even conservative Republicans like Gov. Perry don't do a lot of immigrant-bashing the way you see in Arizona and other conservative states. Perry even signed legislation that allows illegal immigrants who graduated from a Texas high school to get in-state tuition at Texas colleges.
So Gohmert's actually kinda sui generis. In his defense, he's not saying that anyone will commit terrorism while still an infant. He's saying that birthright citizenship allows nefarious brown people to slip into the U.S. and birth babies that they'll then have raised overseas to become suicide bombers. I know that's totally what Mom dreamed of when she gave birth to me before she became a citizen.
And instead you became a lawyer for the White Christian Man. Huge disappointment, PG. Where are we going to get the next generation of terrorists from?
So I looked him up on Google, and I found much commentary hostile to him and his views. I agree that he is an easy target; he provides his own laugh lines. But is there more to him than he offers? He would make a great subject for a biography.
This is Wikipedia's entry on him: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ZHMzQ7ojOmUJ:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_Gohmert+louie+gohmert&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
Apparently from Christian Indians' babies instead of Hindus'. (I am assuming that "Dr. Santhosh Thomas" is of Kerala descent, but it's an assumption based on a lot of experience.)
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