We Don't Even Know What All Diseases They Have

Where the white women at? Via.

“Our schools cannot handle this influx, we don’t even know what all diseases they have. Our health care systems can’t withstand this influx.”-Louie Gohmert

It's Louie Gohmert week (month/year/decade/century) here at Keep Talking, Wingnuts, so I'm just going to have to amplify, again, Gohmert's disgustingly wrong and old "diseased immigrants" meme.

Via LOLGOP, we have more evidence that today's' wingnuts are just recycling old bullshit. Maybe they're lazy. Or maybe they like to stick with what they think are tried and true strategies for fueling xenophobia. Whatever their pitiful excuse is, their current fact-less tirades are so insulting to the kids fleeing violence in countries the US has funded right wing death squads in that I really do hope they keep talking.

Consider:

Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vliet, a Fox News commentator and former director of the ultra-conservative political group Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, writes in the McAllen Monitor that measles is among the “diseases the United States had controlled or virtually eradicated” that are “carried across the border by this tsunami of illegals.”

Fact check: UNICEF reports that 93 percent of kids in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are vaccinated against measles. That’s better than American kids (92 percent).

Furthermore, it’s absurd to claim that the U.S. has eradicated measles while Central America has not. In fact, measles outbreaks have resurged in some American cities. By contrast, according to the World Health Organization, neither Guatemala nor Honduras has had a reported case of measles since 1990.

From the 1896 Edition of the Rams Horn. 

And from Fox News contributor Marc Siegel (author of "False Alarm: Profiting from the Epidemic of Fear"--I shit you not):

...unaccompanied minors “are a likely source” of the mosquito-borne dengue fever spreading to Texas. Siegel ignores two key public health points: First, legal immigrants and travelers are a much larger group than undocumented folks, and just as likely to carry dengue. (I don’t know about y’all, but I’ve never been screened for dengue fever at the Texas-Mexico border.)  Second, mosquitoes can fly.

America is a lot more brown than it was when Eisenhower authorized Operation Wetback, so picking on brown people (or worse) isn't going to be as effective for getting people to vote for you as it used to be. But I'd have to review of a few of my history books to find a time when the xenophobes in America openly denigrated children. This kind of behavior probably won't stop many Jeb Bush Republicans from voting for a Louie Gohmert when given the chance. The question is, how many Democrats will get off their asses in a mid term and vote against one?

Louie Gohmert Just Won't Shut Up and That's a Very Good Thing

Congressman (!) Louie Gohmert

As I've said before, if I were a rich man I'd send Louie Gohmert, Sarah Palin, Steve Stockman, and Michelle Bachman on a speaking tour of swing states and congressional districts, especially along the US border with Mexico. You can keep up with a lot more of the crazy shit they say by watching #KeepTalkingWingnuts on Twitter. I can't post every crazy thing they say... Too busy trying to start another small business.

Today's bonus round of Keep Talking, Wingnuts is brought to you by Congressman (!) Gohmert (it's so odd that I shudder every time I write congressman before his name). It's one thing when a bunch of xenophobic voters show up to yell at a busload of kids trying to escape the violence in countries right wing US governments have been funding right wing death squads in for years. It's quite another when a US congressman suggests we stop the influx of these children by killing them when they cross the border.

Think I'm kidding?

“That’s why I’m hoping that my governor will utilize Article 1, Section 10, that allows a state that is being invaded — in our case more than twice as many just in recent months, more than twice as many than invaded France on D-Day with a doubling of that coming en route, on their way here now under Article 1, Section 10, the state of Texas would appear to have the right, not only to use whatever means, whether it’s troops, even using ships of war, even exacting a tax on interstate commerce that wouldn't normally be allowed to have or utilize, they’d be entitled in order to pay to stop the invasion.”

Yep. You read it right. Louie Gohmert wants to treat the influx of children (running from violence in countries that Louie Gohmert's wingnut buddies in the White House fucked with for decades by funding right wing death squads) like an invading army. He wants to use "whatever means" to stop this "invasion." Including troops. And since Congressman (!) Gohmert served in the US Army, he most certainly knows what troops do to invading forces. But maybe he didn't see combat while he was in the Judge Advocate General's Corps after Vietnam.

The congressman also said, "We don’t know what diseases they’re bringing in." I doubt any diseases they do have could be any worse than the outbreak of measles near Rep. Gohmert's district in North Texas that's a result of anti-vaccine wingnuts fueled by rhetoric from, you guessed it, Louie Gohmert, who agreed with noted I-lost-an-election-to-Barack-Obama-Republican Alan Keyes that it's a scary thought that liberals are using vaccines to kill off enough of the population so that they could control the rest.

Somebody please get this mental midget a bigger soapbox.