WHO LET THE PARANOIDS OUT?
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46 Years After Kennedy, the Virus of Hate Is Back
Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert panders to dangerous paranoids
By Will McCahill
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Posted Nov 21, 09 9:08 AM CST
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(Newser)
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Tomorrow’s 46th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination provides an occasion for Mark Warren to examine “the paranoid strain in the American polity” that has reasserted itself since the election of President Obama, and finds in a Texas Republican congressman just the sort of “skinhead reprobate” whose demagoguery could move one of his constituents to violence. Meet Louie Gohmert.
A man with “the face of a hooligan and the politesse to match,” Gohmert “has screamed that the president is a ‘socialist!’ perhaps louder and longer than anyone else in his caucus (which is quite a distinction),” Warren writes for Esquire. He's also “a birther who believes that Obama is an an alien Muslim.” And while one can’t say Gohmert’s urging anyone to do anything as rash as shoot the president, there’s always the law of unintended consequences: “If you with abandon promulgate such outlandish distortions of the truth, and feel it your duty to stoke the fires of our baser instincts to the point of hysteria over the utter destruction of the American system, do you bear responsibility when someone who ingests your bile responds violently?”