The only possible explanation I can fathom for tea party and ultraconservative Republicans hoping to make Louie Gohmert the speaker of the House is this: temporary insanity.
Gohmert is quite possibly the craziest congressman on Capitol Hill (now that we don't have Michele Bachmann to kick around anymore).
Gohmert's bizarre views on a wide array of matters have become legendary online, in a Bachmannesque sort of way. The liberals over at Mother Jones are having fun with this bizarre attempt to install Gohmert as speaker by compiling 14 of the Texas Republican's greatest hits. They include:
* In 2010, Gohmert argued in a TV interview that Muslim terrorists were sending pregnant women to the United States to give birth to babies who "could be raised and coddled as future terrorists." Shouting into the camera, he told CNN's Anderson Cooper, without offering any evidence, that in 10 or 15 years these "terror babies" would spring into action and attack America.
* He has repeatedly said that liberals who call anti-gay-marriage Christians "haters" are subjecting them to persecution similar to how Nazis treated Jews during the Holocaust.
* In a 2013 conference call with Rick Scarborough, a pastor who called AIDS God's "judgment" for homosexuality, Gohmert said that limiting the number of rounds a gun can fire is "kind of like marriage when you say it's not a man and a woman any more, then why not have three men and one woman, or four women and one man, or why not somebody has a love for an animal?"
* In a particularly comical moment when Gohmert lost his cool, he accused Attorney General Eric Holder of casting "aspersions on my asparagus." At that same 2014 congressional hearing, the Texan claimed that Holder failed to prevent Boston Marathon bombings because the Justice Department has "partnered with" Islamic terrorists.
* Certain elements within the U.S. government want to implement Shariah law, according to the congressman's 2013 comments on a radio show, and Americans should take up arms and be ready.
* While guest-hosting a radio show last summer, Gohmert sounded like he was open to the theory that the mass shooting at Sandy Hook was a hoax intended to advance gun control.
* Last October he appeared on a radio show to explain why the demise of the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell will lead to excessive amounts of massages among gay soldiers. "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."
* And (here's my personal favorite) while speaking with Glenn Beck last year, Gohmert claimed that the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Tom Frieden, was "commander of the Democrats' new war on women nurses" because he threw them "under the bus" in the agency's response to Ebola.
Years ago, there was a phrase for people who said or did particularly stupid things -- "What a Gomer." That jab was a reference to the simple-minded TV character Gomer Pyle.
Now, we have a congressman whose thick drawl sounds a bit like Pyle and whose name sounds even more like Pyle.
To start a new trend, we could pass off silly statements with a simple response: "What a Gohmert."
We could poke fun at Gohmert. Or we could make him the third most powerful man in America.
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