Keeping up with the East Texas P’s
by Susan Bankston
My friends say that I’m obsessed with Congressvarmint Louie Gohmert, but Louie is obsessed with acting crazy. I love people acting crazy. I can’t take my eyes off them.
There’s very little I can say about Louie Gohmert that hasn’t already been said more eloquently on bathroom walls all over Texas. In all honesty, he’s so narrow-minded that his ears rub together.
I have an app that tells me where I am, and an app that tells me what to cook for dinner, and an app that sends me a text message when there’s breaking news, and an app that tells me where all the sales are, and an app that lets me talk into my telephone machine and it automatically puts it in writing. But what I really, really need is an app that tells me when Louie Gohmert is fixing to be on C-SPAN, because something nuttier than squirrel poop is going to happen the minute he opens his mouth.
Louie comes from East Texas. East Texas is pines, poverty, and Pentecostals. They flat-out love Louie because he’s a pinhead—keeping with that whole P-themed thing they have going on.
You probably remember Louie as the guy who firmly believed that people were sneaking into this country to have terrorist babies and then sneaking back out and raising those babies to be proper terrorists so they could sneak them back in 20 years later to break into your back window and ninja you to death. (Okay, so I made up the whole back window/ninja thing—but you almost believed me, didn’t you, because the whole story is so nuts.)
Louie took his story on CNN and got into a hand-waving hollerfest at Anderson Cooper for daring to question Louie about it. Anderson Cooper should have gotten a Nobel Prize for keeping a straight face. If they don’t give a Nobel Prize for that, they should.
Louie was also not pleased with the Ninth Circuit overruling Prop. 8 in California. Here’s what he had to say about it:
“Nature seemed to like the idea of an egg and a sperm coming together because of pro-creation. Apparently [the California judges] thought the sperm had far better use some other way, biologically, combining it with something else. But the voters of Iowa came back and said, ‘You know what, if you’re not smart enough to figure out actual plumbing…then perhaps we need new judges,’ and that’s what they did.”
No, I don’t have any idea what he’s talking about either. But odds are, neither does Louie.
I have heard Louie say the word “homosexual” several times, and he makes it a seven- or eight-syllable word: ho-ah-mhoo-sex-you-ah-aaal.
Louie also thinks the president’s tax plan is a favor to gays, because the tax credits under the president’s plan would favor people who live together but aren’t married, and everybody knows that only gay people live together without marriage. Damn, Louie caught us plotting with the gays again.
And next, bets were that Louie’s tongue is running in the Looneyville Barefoot Marathon when he orated about the Founding Fathers on the House floor. “Of course, the founders they all understood marriage to be between a man and a woman—that’s just the way the history of the country has been,” he said.
It makes me wonder if “painfully stupid” is just a figure of speech or if Louie actually does feel some level of discomfort.
Next thing we knew, Louie decided not to buy into the whole tone-it-the-hell-down idea, and introduced a bill to allow members of the United States Congress to carry handguns on the House floor. Oh hell, let’s just do away with their tote board and let the last one standing make the laws. That’d sure make C-SPAN more fun.
And then last month, Louie made headlines in the Washington Post for his views on how the Keystone pipeline will be a great thing because it is going to help caribou get lucky.
No, seriously, Louie is now an expert on caribou sparkin’ and canoodlin’ even though there were no caribou in East Texas even during the Ice Age, which is something Louie ought to know, because, according to Louie, that was just a couple of years ago in that Steeple-People timeframe he uses.
While Louie was discussing this animal-husbandry theory of pipelines making beasts frisky, even Alaska representative Don Young was openly laughing.
It seems that Louie has a theory. It’s not based on science or anything. It’s just “Louie’s Theory of Caribou Love-Making,” which, admittedly, we did not have before now.
Louie postulates that the caribou very much enjoy the warmth a pipeline radiates. “So when they want to go on a date, they invite each other to head over to the pipeline,” he informed his colleagues with his eyes a-twinkle. “It’s apparently the equivalent of being wined and dined. And that has resulted in a ten-fold caribou population boom,” he concluded.
Louie did not specify if this also involved disco balls and red velvet bedspreads, or where he got the number “ten-fold.”
No, he’s not kidding. Louie thinks that shutting down the Keystone pipeline will keep caribou from doing the wild thing. Because they like heat. Which is why they live in Alaska. In the tundra.
Now you’re probably wondering why I told you this whole big long story. It’s because I am looking out for you. Remember this: if you ever get stuck in an elevator with Louie Gohmert, whatever you do, do not generate heat. Lord only knows what it does to Louie, but it could not be anything good.
Susan Bankston lives in Richmond, Texas, where she writes about her hairdresser at The World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, Inc., at juanitajean.com.
FB Comments