A few months ago, in a column that introduced avid Needlefish readers to then newly-minted Congressperson Marjorie Taylor Greene (R) (QAnon), everybody’s favourite Georgia Peach and manifest racist moonbat, I had one of my frequent moments of out-of-the-blue inspiration, and coined a brand new noun to be used with reference to her and others like her: she was a Gohmert. Think of it as a new species of politician, the way a flounder is a species of fish.
To recap, Gohmerts are named after Representative Louis Gohmert (R)(Texas), once reckoned to be the most profoundly and indeed uniquely stupid person in the entire Republican Caucus, and probably the world.
These days, as the science has advanced, we’ve come to understand that in fact Louis Gohmert is by no means the only critter of his kind in the US Congress, but rather just one in a vast herd of breeding pairs which, lined up end to end, would probably form a column that stretched from the steps of the Capitol to someplace in the Florida Panhandle, say Tallahasse.
Now, this is a little tricky. Not everybody you’d expect is necesarilly the sort of animal I’m describing here. Yet many are. Take Devon Nunes, for example:
Gohmert.
How about Jim Jordan?
Gohmert.
Mitch McConnell, then?
Not a Gohmert.
Ted Cruz?
Hard to accept, but not a Gohmert.**
Matt Gaetz?
Oh yeah, Gohmert for sure. Gohmert from here to breakfast.
Huh? Why not Mitch or Ted? Well, to be a real Gohmert it’s not enough to be vile, cruel, in the pocket of the donor class, or devoted to the project of destroying the American Republic, while subverting every value that I and most moral people hold dear. It’s not enough to be a bigoted tool of the plutocrats, on a mission to disenfranchise everybody who isn’t a white male with an investment account at Goldman Sachs, or to dedicate oneself to the devolution of a once great democracy into something more akin to Ceausescu’s Romania. Candidates must be all of those things too, of course, but the defining characteristic, absent which you may well be disgusting and fit for eternal damnation, yet still not a Gohmert, is a signal lack of brain power. A Gohmert is a moron. Thick, you see. Dumb as me arse. Couldn’t-spell-“cat”-if-you-spotted-him-the-“c” caliber weapons-grade stupid. Thus, Bill Barr, no matter what else you could say about him, is certainly no Gohmert; James Inhofe is. Lauren Boebert is.
For many others on the margins, it’s hard to say, really, but one supposes it’s possible to not be a Gohmert, yet still on occasion do something so breathtakingly silly that for at least that moment, you seemed about as cerebral as a bag of hair, and are therefore deserving of some sort of mention in dispatches. Hence the subject of today’s post: The Needlefish Gohmert Awards (!), to be handed out whenever it just feels right to celebrate this or that individual instance of certifiably Gohmert-esque dumbfuckery.
At some point, we’ll have to decide how many of these awards you can win before being adjudicated a true Gohmert after all, and not just intermittently Gohmert-adjacent.
OK! So, the winner of today’s Gomey is Senator Ron Johnson (R)(Wisconsin), who’s been behaving like a real horse’s ass for a while now, and would probably already have a passel of these gongs if I’d thought it up sooner. These days Johnson has been talking like a member of the tinfoil-hatted QAnon Corps, and has trafficked in various outlandish conspiracy theories, verified Russian propaganda, internet hoaxes, and other nonsense of a sort that used to be heard mainly from the flop-sweating screamers of the alt-right, hardcore shit-slingers like Rush Limbaugh, or Alex Jones. He’s also been peddling, like many Republicans, the revisionist lie that the sacking of Capitol Hill on January 6 was actually no big deal, and nothing at all like the violent insurrection that all of those snowflaky Democrats made it out to be. Truly, the good, decent folks who were running all over the place for a while, breaking things and looking to abduct politicians, were actually patriots, righteous in their anger at Biden’s well documented and absolutely real theft of the election from the One True President. Like Tucker Carlson said.
This weekend it was shaping up to be just another cartload of the usual stuff, ho-hum, when suddenly he found his “A” game and gave it that extra special bit of the old Johnson magic:
That’s how you do it! Put a little pepper on it, as they used to say in baseball.
Anyway, he was right about one thing: he did get in trouble for that. In fact, he stirred up a veritable media shit storm, and will now have to ride out the blowback for a while, which he probably can, but whoa. Seriously. Dude. Holy flapping crapfest. Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick. You heard him. He just up and said it: he wasn’t afraid, because, well, he’s a white guy, just like the patriots then roaming the halls looking to hang Mike Pence and make examples of the likes of AOC, Nancy Pelosi, Ilhan Omar, and assorted others of that crew. But listen, if they’d been a bunch of those famously violent boogie men from Antifa and Black Lives Matter, you know, a crew of your darker types, then he would have been scared. It would have been Code Brown, you want the unvarnished truth, and no apologies either.
There’s more, astonishingly more, that we could rant about from this interview, but what the hell, we’ve seen enough: Ron, buddy, come on up here and collect your well-earned Gomey.
Attaboy.
**Though clearly, he was getting there with the whole Cancun thing.
the needlefish 
Would it be possible to do a lobotomy on these people? My wife, reading over my shoulder said “what? You need a brain before you can do that”. Enough said!
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