Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert said tea partiers should rise up and fight against efforts to quash the group by the Republican Party’s old guard.
During a speech Sunday at the South Carolina Tea Party Convention in Myrtle Beach, Mr. Gohmert argued that tea partiers need to organize and rally against the watered-down principles of many in the GOP, including House Speaker John Boehner, former White House adviser Karl Rove and the executive heads at the Chamber of Commerce.
Quoting John Belushi’s character Bluto in the movie “Animal House,” Mr. Gohmert, a member of the Tea Party Caucus, asked the crowd, “What’s all this laying around stuff?”
“Why would anyone just lay around when our liberty, lives and loves are on the line? Did someone say let it go? The war’s over? What? Over? Did someone say over? No. It’s not over until we decide it’s over,” Mr. Gohmert said, according to Breitbart. “Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? No! Well it ain’t over now! Because when the going gets tough, the tough get going! What happened to the tea party I used to know? Where’s the spirit? Where’s the guts?
“This could be the greatest time of our lives but you’re going to let it be the worst because we’re afraid to go with Louie,” he said. “We might get in trouble. Just kiss my aspen tree. From now on, not me, I’m not going to take it. We’re not going to take it anymore right? We’re going to stand up and take our country back.”
Mr. Gohmert also argued that the White House under President Obama was out of control.
“We’ve got the NSA getting logs of every call you make. The IRS is weaponized like Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of,” he said. “A law enforcement arm of the U.S. was forcing the sale of guns to people so they could get them to drug cartels to kill hundreds of Mexicans and even at least one or more Americans. You got a U.S. administration supporting rebels in other countries that are infused with America’s greatest terrorist enemies but the administration cannot even call them the ’radical Islamists’ that they are, while we’re punishing countries like Egypt that has finally stood up them. We have Republican leaders who are not content to lose presidential elections but now they think we need to get moderates who will stand not for anything but for everything.”
• Cheryl K. Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com.
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