In the face of repeated defeat, it’s business as usual for the Republican Party. At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) yesterday, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), to a cheering crowd, proclaimed that the Vietnam War was winnable, “but people in Washington decided we would not win it.” He said the only lesson of Vietnam is that “You don’t send American men or women to harm’s way unless you’re going to give them the authority and what they need to win and bring them home.”
He also stated that President Jimmy Carter should have gone to war with Iran, saying, “When our embassy was attacked, it was an act of war in 1979.” Gohmert went on to say that we have Americans dying today because Jimmy Carter did not go to war with Iran in 1979.
The Congressman has never had an issue with speaking his mind. In 2010, he warned us of “terror babies,” a diabolical plot in which terrorists send pregnant women to the U.S. to have their babies, and then return home where, according to the Congressman, the children “could be raised and coddled as future terrorists” until “twenty, thirty years down the road, they can be sent in to help destroy our way of life.”
Although there seemed to be a lack of evidence to support the terrorist plot, Gohmert used the conspiracy theory to bash the Obama administration’s immigration policy. A year earlier he went on a minor rampage over Obama’s healthcare plan, spouting statements like, “One in five people have to die because they went to socialized medicine! … I would hate to think that among five women, one of em’ is gonna die because we go to socialized care.”
Alisha Mims is a writer and researcher for Ring of Fire.
