On June 25th, Speaker and Bronzer of the House John Boehner announced his plans to file a lawsuit against the President. And last week President Obama responded by saying, "So, sue me." Yes, the President is a former professor of constitutional law. And John Boehner is very good at football and bar-tending. But perhaps the President shouldn't be quite so flippant. Because Boehner isn't the only one out to get Obama. And he's certainly not the smartest.
As I looked at some of the countless Right Wing politicians who have attacked President Obama this week (so far), I found myself forced to admit that though I disagree with their positions, these critics are, like it or not, intellectual forces to be reckoned with. To dismiss their cerebral prowess would be as dishonest and dangerous as as denying the lipless good looks of Mitch McConnell. So, I urge the President to take these attacks seriously and respond appropriately. Let us look at these great critical thinkers, their history of intellectual acuity and their undeniably logical and reasoned attacks on our president.
1. Texas Governor Rick Perry: The Right of Hand-Shake Refusal
Though the White House invited Governor Perry to greet the President at the Houston Airport on Wednesday, Perry, refused. Why? Well, Rick may be a southern gentleman, but, as anyone who has ever heard him speak knows, the wonkish Perry prefers policy discussions and serious debate over small chat and niceties. Or, as Perry explained in a letter to the president,
I appreciate the offer to greet you at Austin-Bergstrom Airport, but a quick handshake on the tarmac will not allow for a thoughtful discussion regarding the humanitarian and national security crises enveloping the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. I would instead offer to meet with you at any time during your visit to Texas for a substantive meeting to discuss this critical issue.
Perry is so committed to "substantive" immigration talks, that, with sufficient advance warning, he would be willing to re-arrange his busy schedule of jogging, killing Coyotes and executing innocent people to meet with the President of the United States: "With the appropriate notice, I am willing to change my schedule to facilitate this request.”
Expertise: Secession Law, Texas History, Remembering two out three things.
President Obama is no match for Governor Perry and his encyclopedic knowledge the law and history. As you may recall, Perry once said, “when we came into the nation in 1845, we were a republic, we were a stand-alone nation. And one of the deals was, we can leave anytime we want." And, he added, in the legalistic jargon in which he is so proficient, "we’re kind of thinking about that again.” It turns out that Perry was wrong about the whole "stand alone nation deal." But there was no way he would have known that unless he had followed who had won the Civil War or had heard of the Supreme Court Case Texas v. White which held that“[t]he union between Texas and the other States was as complete, as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original States. There was no place for reconsideration, or revocation, except through revolution, or through consent of the States.” But both of those events occurred way before Perry was even a twinkle in his father's racist eye. And he can hardly be expected to know anything about them.
Like many geniuses, Perry has a nearly photographic memory as he demonstrated during a Republican debate when he remembered not one but two of the three agencies he vowed to shut down if elected president: “I will tell you, it is three agencies of government when I get there that are gone. Commerce, Education, and the -- What's the third one there? Let's see.The third agency I would do away with…the…ahh…Education…ahh…Commerce, and, let’s see... can’t, the third one. I can’t." But even intellectuals are able to make mistakes. The issue is how they explain them. And Perry's explanation for his memory lapse was perfect: "Oops.”
2. Entertainer Sarah Palin: Impeach.
The commitment-phobic former Governor and perpetual entertainer Sarah Palin called for the impeachment of President Obama on Tuesday. Writing in the scholarly journal that is the website Breitbart, Palin explained that the “unsecured border crisis is the last straw" and that, “It’s time to impeach..." "President Obama’s rewarding of lawlessness," Palin argued, "including his own, is the foundational problem here... It’s not going to get better, and in fact irreparable harm can be done in this lame-duck term as he continues to make up his own laws as he goes along.”
Expertise: All Newspapers Ever, Supreme Court History, theology and Intelligence.
It feels unnecessary to even bother discussing Palin's intellectual strengths, since they are so obvious. But, just to be consistent and thorough, let us remember that she reads more newspapers than any other human being ever. When asked by Katie Couric what she read regularly to stay informed, Palin responded, "I’ve read most of them again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media." When Couric persisted and asked which publications Palin read "specifically," the then Veep hopeful said, "Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years." When Couric pressed Palin to name a single one, she responded, "I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news." Though the liberal media used this interview as an excuse to pick on Palin, anyone objective knows that the exchange merely proved what we already knew: 1) Palin reads so much that she can't keep track of it, and 2) the gestapo-like tactics for which Katie Couric is so famous can throw anyone off their game. Or as Palin put it more charitably, "Katie’s purpose—shared by most media types—seemed to be to frame a ‘gotcha’ moment. And it worked.”
But as fellow eloquent sage George W. Bush once said, “fool me once, shame on, shame on you. Fool me, you can’t get fooled again.”
Thus, when Commandant Couric tried to trick Palin into naming a single Supreme Court Case with which she disagreed, Sarah knew to avoid the trick question, saying: "Well, I could think of -- of any again, that could be best dealt with on a more local level. Maybe I would take issue with. But you know, as mayor, and then as governor and even as a vice president, if I'm so privileged to serve, wouldn't be in a position of changing those things but in supporting the law of the land as it reads today."
I don't have enough time or space to list all of Palin's credentials, but I will say that she is also well versed in the history of Christianity and intelligence-fathering, as she revealed when she spoke at an NRA event and said, "waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists.”
3. Louis Gohmert: Defund White House to Stop Obama from Letting in Diseased Aliens who will Turn Texas into a Blue (and Diseased) State.
Lots of Republicans (who don't own businesses or need landscaping or lawn-mowing) want to keep and/ or kick "illegals" out of this great country (that was stolen from others founded and founded illegally) so they can't steal the jobs that U.S.-born citizens don't do anyway. But Representative Louis Gohmert (R-TX) is especially astute when it comes to the socio-economic and political forces behind immigration policy. In fact, just Tuesday, Gohmert called on Congress to defund the White House, the Attorney General of the United States and, as it's outlined in The Constitution, "anything that the president cares deeply about." Why is bankrupting the entire country so imperative? Well, because Obama is allowing in dangerous foreign elements: “Our schools cannot handle this influx... Our health care systems can’t withstand this influx.... We don’t even know what all diseases they have." I think we can cross Smallpox and Montezuma's Revenge off the list. And it's not just that The President is allowing this. He's encouraging it so, as Gohmert figured out, Texas and the country (and probably the world!) vote Democrat: “In the end, they [Democrats] have said that they want to turn Texas blue, they want to turn America blue.” Obama's plan is to admit “hundreds of thousands or millions of people" and "give them the ability to vote.” And the final part of the scheme is blackmail: Democrats would tell the invaders “If you want to keep getting the benefits, you have to vote, and President Obama’s lawyers are not going to allow them to ask for an ID, so go vote or you’re going to lose the benefits you’re getting now.... That drives people to vote and it will ensure that Republicans don’t ever get elected again." Pretty brillz!
Expertise: Alien movement, Enfranchisement, Crustaceans, Photobombing.
Louis Gohmert's grasp of the relationship between immigration and voting patterns comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with his opinion-based research on the subject. Just last year he explained that, counterintuitively, denying amnesty to "Hispanics" will actually attract them because it will "preserve a country that Hispanics will want to come to.” Gohmert's insights into the way Hispanics think remind me of the the insights of Sherry Argov, author of Why Men Love Bitches. In fact, I'm now inspired to write my own book, Why Hispanics Love Rejection or Hispanics: They're Just Like Men Who Love Bitches.
Like the others listed here, Gohmert is a renaissance man. He's also well-versed in class-based dietary habits. For instance, he supports cutting off food-stamps-- read food-- because they they turn their recipients into obese king crab legs-consuming heartbreakers:
When I look into the eyes of constituents, who want to provide for their children … and they talk about standing in line, I've heard this story so many times … standing in line at a grocery store behind people with a food-stamp car—one individual said, I love crab legs. You know, the big king crab legs. I love those. But we haven't been able to have those in who knows when. But I'm standing behind a guy who has those in his basket, and I'm looking longingly like, when can I ever make enough again where our family can have something like that, and sees the food-stamp card pulled out, and provided, he looks at the king crab legs and looks at the ground meat, and realizes because he does pay income tax, he doesn't get more back than he pays in, he is actually helping pay for the king crab legs when he can't pay for them for himself.
Take a minute to wipe away your tears. OK. Moving on. The last talent Gohmertian talent I wanted to highlight was his unique and unsung photobombing abilities, which requires major hand-eye coordination and stealth.
4. Iowa GOP Senate Candidate Joni Ernst: Castrate & Impeach
Finally, allow me to share one more woman whose intellect we and the president dismiss at our own peril. Her name is Joni Ernst and she is running for the Senate in Iowa. Sarah Palin may be in the spotlight this week for calling for Obama's impeachment, but a recently discovered video reveals that Ernst was advocating for this six months ago, making her the intellectual trend-setter. Ernst complained that the President had "become a dictator” and needed to "face those repercussions...whether that's removal from office, whether that's impeachment." She outlined exactly how the President has become a dictator, using the precise and clinical language of a Political Science professor: he "oversteps his bounds... when he's appointing czars... So he has become a dictator.... He is running amok."
Expertise: Swine Castration, Propaganda
Ernst is the least known of the four people I review here but perhaps the biggest threat. She brings to the table not merely a sharp mind, but a sharp knife. She is the only person that I'm aware of who is calling for impeachment and who has experience removing pig testicles. As she boasted in her campaign video, “I grew up castrating hogs on an Iowa farm.” She knows how to "cut pork" and "make ’em squeal.” This genius video, which features adorable and sympathetic pigs, is a brilliant way to reach that sociopathic, sadistic swing voter.
