The national poster child against the cancer of gerrymandering is Louie Gohmert. Here in Texas we call him Screwy Louie, as he is famous for babbling streams of offensive insults and nonsense.  One of his most infamous blatherings came after the tragedy at Newtown when he wistfully mused what would have happened had the school principal kept an M4 (a semi-auto rifle) in her office.  He regularly spouts this kind of bullshit.

On Tuesday, Louie Gohmert opened his mouth and again Louie Gohmert came out.  In a hearing of the subcommittee on energy and mineral resources considering a bunch of bills that essentially undo much of the regulation around oil and gas development, Gohmert testified that the oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon blowout really didn’t damage anything, that nature “does amazing things” and that on his personal trip to the Louisiana Gulf Coast he never found more than “a drop or two” of oil on the beach.  I would speculate that he never found any oil because you can’t see anything when you have your head up your ass as Gohmert often does.

The gulf blowout in 2010 was the worst offshore oil spill in history.  The well flowed  approximately 5 million barrels of oil and unmeasured billions of cubic feet of natural gas.  Much of that oil was never recovered.  Oh, and 11 men died in the blowout that caused the disaster.  Did some of the oil that came to the surface degrade naturally?  Of course, but it was a tiny amount.  What most people don’t understand is that oil that is spilled from a well in deep water reacts completely differently than oil spilled on the surface like happened during the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska.  In deep water, the vast majority of oil never comes to the surface, becoming entrained in the deep water column for God knows how long, killing marine life and polluting the ocean floor.

Of course, you wouldn’t expect Screwy Louie to understand any of that, especially since he’s an expert in only one subject, namely being a jackass on national television.  Screwy Louis Gohmert, National Embarrassment of Texas.