WTF Friday: Snake Oil for the Hair Loss, Dan

Not that long ago, one of David Dewhurst’s campaign officials told me that Team Dewhurst knew they were probably going to lose to Dan Patrick in the lieutenant governor runoff, but were going to start spending Dewhurst’s personal fortune to “burn the place down.” I didn’t realize he was talking about self-immolation.

There’s plenty to attack Dan Patrick on. He’s a smug radio-talk show wing-nut who thinks God is whispering in his ear and is so vain that he once wrote a book called The Second Most-Important Book You Will Ever Read. But Dewhurst has been almost totally inept at landing any punches. You can tell he really loathes Patrick, but the more vicious the attacks, the more Dew stumbles. Dew is Wile E. Coyote and Patrick is the smirking roadrunner running on the far-right of the road.

First, there was this ad. It’s impossible to look away from and yet it’s so startlingly weird and vengeful.

Then there was the debate. There’s plenty to chew on and Chris Hooks gives a great blow-by-blow. Dewhurst and Patrick tangled over whether he (The Dew) had chicken at a steakhouse—that was about the level of the discourse.

But the WTF line of the night, to my mind, was Dewhurst’s attempt to harpoon the white whale with a barbed line. Just kind of out of thin air, he goes:

“Do you have snake oil for the hair loss, too, Dan?”

As the some of the Cro-Magnons in the Texas House say when the lady legislators are debating… Meoooowww!

And this week Louie Gohmert (fun fact: Gohmert was class president at Texas A&M and that’s an Aggie joke that needs no punchline) has achieved a rare feat, a Triple Louie—three unrelated WTF comments in as many days.

On Wednesday, he reacted to the release of the 800-page National Climate Assessment, which documents the growing ravages of climate change in painstaking, heavily footnoted detail by reaching into the comments section of, say, Breitbart.com.

“Apparently this climate change was global freezing back in the 1970s. Then global warming and then, when it quit warming, now it’s climate change.”

On Thursday, at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, Gohmert accused a Comcast executive of conspiring to keep Glenn Beck off the air. And, of course, this being Louie Gohmert, Al Gore, Sharia law and other apparitions made an appearance in his tale:

“And it was reported that Al Jazeera wanted to get their Sharia law push into the United States, and they were willing to pay big bucks….but they wouldn’t do the deal unless Comcast was willing to keep them in its list of networks provided. So it was reported Comcast agreed, so Al Gore got all that oil and carbon based money. Then, that kept Glenn Beck off the air. Of Comcast.”

Some people say Gohmert’s kinda dim. But that is a story as convoluted as a Russian novel; only a supple mind could keep it straight.

Then, on Friday, he smote Godwin’s law a mighty blow, comparing a growing acceptance of LGBT folks to the “Nazi takeover of Europe.”

“So it is amazing that in the name of liberality, in the name of being tolerant, this fascist intolerance has arisen. People that stand up and say, you know, I agree with the majority of Americans, I agree with Moses and Jesus that marriage was a man and a woman, now all of a sudden, people like me are considered haters, hate mongers, evil, which really is exactly what we’ve seen throughout our history as going back to the days of the Nazi takeover in Europe.”

It’s almost like Gohmert’s being forced to wear a pink triangle. Poor guy.

Speaking of Nazis… Kesha Rogers. She’s the LaRouche Democrat who, despite the best efforts of the state Democratic party, made it into a runoff for U.S. Senate. Rogers is running on an “Impeach Obama” platform. She was in the Valley this week, rounding up votes from the anti-Obama, industrialize-the-moon Democratic voting bloc.

“The president has earned his Hitler mustache,” she said Thursday, adding that the comparison stems from supposed similarities between Obama’s signature domestic legislation, the Affordable Care Act, and a Nazi euthanasia program.

Partisan affiliations aside, Gohmert and Rogers seem to have a lot in common. The only difference is Gohmert’s serving his fifth term in Congress.