He was only one of a handful of House Republicans to vote against John Boehner, boldly managing a "present" vote as the most spectacularly incompetent congressional coup of all time collapsed around its supposed planners.

In the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School murders, his response was to introduce legislation repealing the gun free zones around schools, and for the same reason as the similar NRA blustering—because what we needed, according to both, was to have many more people wandering around school zones with guns, and that would probably work out just fine.

He was abruptly cut off in a Fox News interview after comparing Barack Obama to Saddam Hussein, thus managing to rank as one of the few crackpot Republicans too nuts even for Fox News to stomach.

When Obama introduced a set of executive actions that included things like "finally appoint a permanent head of the ATF, even if that makes Republicans sad" and "government scientists should be allowed to research gun violence", Steve Stockman threatened in an exceptionally frothing statement to impeach Obama, if necessary, in order to stop such obviously scandalous things. This may have been the first, biggest sign that Steve Stockman is in fact a bona fide moron, but he quickly surpassed even that.



That brings us to Stockman's latest episode of Congressional Moron Theater. In response to other politicians inviting Sandy Hook first responders, children, and other figures to the State of the Union, decided to rebut the presence of those people by inviting Ted Nugent, a man whose unhinged, violent rhetoric even managed to garner a visit by the Secret Service:



Nugent in the past has threatened to kill President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and California Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer. “I was in Chicago and I said hey Obama, you might want to suck on one of these you punk; Obama, he’s a piece of shit, and I told him to suck on my machine gun,” Nugent screamed during a concert while brandishing two machine guns, “Then I was in New York and I said, ‘Hey Hillary you might want to ride one of these into the sunset you worthless bitch…. Then I was out in California and I thought, Barbara Boxer, she might want to suck on my machine gun, hey Dianne Feinstein ride one of these you worthless whore.”

You might ask which parts of that cause Steve Stockman, in his official press release about the stunt, to refer to Ted Nugent as "a patriot". I imagine it's those very threats, because nobody, anywhere, has any idea what the vigorously self-emasculated Nugent actually does these days aside from drunkenly threatening members of the opposition while waving guns around. My own opinion is that Steve Stockman referring to the gun fetishist and possibly-drug-addled Nugent as a "patriot" in a press release is quite possibly a worse sin than inviting him to a government function at all, but that is because my idea of "patriot", especially in the wake of the latest in a long string of horrific mass murders, does not revolve around telling the nation's president to "suck on my machine gun." For Congressman Stockman, it does. (And can you imagine any other actual member of Congress, in the past, so closely aligning himself with someone who wished violence against the government? Forget rebranding the party, Karl Rove, you may have your work cut out for you convincing Americans that Republicans aren't for outright treason, given a few more years of this. Even secession talk is considered tame, now that "Obama, he's a piece of shit, and I told him to suck on my machine gun" is considered the high point of Republican "patriotism.")



There is another part of Stockman's press release regarding Nugent that I think even more perfectly encapsulates the man. It's unrelated, but that's all right: the spurious addition merely adds to the Stockmanesque mood of being absolutely batshit crazy all the time, about every subject:



Stockman will also be unveiling this week The Obama Failometer, a ten-foot-long billboard that will objectively measure the failure of Obama’s economic policies. The Obama Failometer tracks four monthly economic indicators from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; jobs created, civilian labor force participation rate and black and Hispanic unemployment. The figures are mathematically weighted to provide a measurement, on a scale from 1 to 1000, of just how badly Obama’s economic policies are failing. The inaugural Monthly Obama Failometer Score is an off-the-charts 1,179.

That's right. Steve Stockman's new 1-to-1000 metric of how badly he thinks Obama is failing starts off at the Spinal Tappish 1,179, thus proving the Texas Republican innumerate as well as nuts. I would not be overly surprised if Texas schools are now teaching that 1,179 is between 1 and 1000, possibly because to believe otherwise marks you as an evolution supporter, but to have Steve Stockman come up with his own chart that says so really just encapsulates the man. Texas Republican Steve Stockman, once drummed from the party for being nuts, now the future of the party again.

Given material like this to work with, there's nothing Rove or anyone else can do to paint the new Republican Party as anything more than a collection of humiliating hucksters, dullards and outright morons, and the only thing left now (while waiting the possible downfall of the republic, of course, possibly because entire vast swaths of the population forget how to dress themselves or that gasoline should not be used as a dessert topping) is to grab the popcorn and watch them try.



In our efforts to battle against the influence of the NRA (and people like Steve Stockman), Daily Kos is enthusiastically supporting Democrat Robin Kelly in Illinois' 2nd district. Consider contributing to Kelly today!