Texas Republican Louie Gohmert has never been accused of being an intellectual. In this edition of "stupid things Congressman Louie Gohmert says," Gohmert has a novel proposal for
helping to balance the federal budget:
We promised at least $100 billion in the first year, we didn't even get anywhere near to that. So let's start cutting like we promised. And I think S&Ps will be satisfied, I think that it gets us on the right track. But the Senate, not to be able to cut $1.6 billion. Excuse me? Just defund the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt for a while and we'll be there. It's just ridiculous.
As Media Matters notes, it's "not entirely clear" what Louie Gohmert is talking about. (I wish I held the copyright to that phrase: I could make a fortune.) We pay $1.6 billion to the Muslim Brotherhood? And if we defund it for the next 80 years or so, we'll have cut $100 billion?
The best anyone can determine is he's talking about total aid to Egypt, but Louie Gohmert gets so easily confused when it comes to those crazy foreigners that he pretty much assumes they're all the Muslim Brotherhood, every last one of them. And Muslim Brotherhood is a nice, scary sounding phrase (myself, I consider "brides of Christ" to be downright terrifying, but we can get into that later) that sets the hair standing on every good conservative neck. We can be grateful that he at least knows there is a country named Egypt, perhaps?
I know I've been harping on the perceived intelligence of conservatives in quite a few posts of late. I realize it, but it has been more on my mind than usual, probably because of the recent Republican debates. It seems an absolute requirement that every statement be filtered down to its dumbest, most primitive form before the conservative audiences will be happy with it: You can't show a shred of compassion to the children of illegal immigrants, you have to be careful not to be too anti-cancer, and you must never, ever try to do anything that ever made it easier for anyone to buy health insurance. You have to promise gasoline will be 10 cents a gallon, and that dimes will be made of silver and worth $3.50. You have to make your entire economic plan sound like a late-night cable TV commercial, and it will only cost you $9.99.
Granted, primary season is always the dumbest period of politics (which means, now, that two of every four years is mired in unrelenting, enforced stupidity) but I think most people would look at the current crop of candidates, which features Ron Freaking Paul as one of the saner, less batshit insane voices, and agree that it has gone above and beyond the usual call.
Congress, meanwhile, is truly full of nitwits. Michele Bachman, Steve King, Peter King, Gohmert and so on, all led by the willfully obtuse Eric Cantor, led in turn by the baffling Boehner, all continually meshed in self-created epic ideological battles that threaten to shut down one basic government function or another on, at this point, a weekly basis. If you were out to show government incompetence, however, I suppose I would say that not being able to manage to even keep the thing running without constant, hiccuping interruptions caused by an ongoing stream of bungling temper tantrums is a fine way to do it.
It is not ideology, though. It is the stubborn insistence on lying, on reframing every issue via the most narrow ideological frameworks, no matter how nonsensical or spurious it renders your logic. Things that were bipartisan in past years are deeply partisan now, because now they are the signs of socialism, or the result of a president that is out of control, and so on and so forth. The issues and programs remain the same: The difference is that "conservatism" now means something appreciably different from what it did even ten years ago. And in modern "conservatism," the shallowest, meanest interpretation of something is always the best, even if it is, on its face, nonsensical.
Does Louie Gohmert really think we give "$1.6 billion" to the "Muslim Brotherhood"? Maybe. Maybe not.
Which is worse?
Top Comments for today are here.