GOP congressman tries to argue that giving older people free health care is bad

Time to Log Off is a weekly series documenting the many ways our political figures show their whole asses online.

It’s widely considered fait accompli that Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert is the dumbest man in Congress — no small feat, of course, considering the company he keeps and the broader GOP in general. And yet, for my money, there’s a dark horse candidate poised to knock Gohmert out of the top spot once and for all: Kentucky’s own gun-humping, ineptly grandstanding congressman Thomas Massie.

Fresh off his turn in the spotlight for proudly — and ostensibly accidentally — broadcasting a quote from American neo-Nazi and confirmed pedophile Kevin Strom, Massie is back in the news this week, this time for his apparent inability to understand math, or science, or much of anything, really.

Did you know that nearly 100% of deaths worldwide involved people who at some point in their lives wore pants? Clearly, we should look into legislation banning pants. That’s simply the conservative thing to do, I guess. And it’s a well-established correlation between “people who’ve gotten a haircut at some point” and the overwhelming majority of people arrested for having sex with trees, so someone should probably explore options for criminalizing barber shops, too.

Now, perhaps you’re feeling overly generous toward Massie, and are willing to believe that he’s genuinely dumb enough not have made the connection between the fact that Medicare is the federally subsidized health care system that primarily serves retirees, and that COVID is particularly dangerous and harmful toward the elderly. That’s certainly possible — there’s more than enough evidence to support the assertion that he’s just too stupid to understand how these things work. But let’s assume he’s marginally smarter than appearances would have you believe. In that case, Massie is deliberately tweeting as if his constituents are the dumb ones, instead. Either way, it’s not great, Bob!

Meanwhile, the most recent data shows Massie’s home state of Kentucky with a COVID positivity rate of nearly 22%. Perhaps it’s time for the congressman to stop tweeting nonsense, log off, and do something about that, instead.