Showing posts with label Steve King. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Steve King. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 24, 2019

King of Kooks, Lord of Losers

The Passion of Steve King (Wikipedia photo)
I'm just gonna leave this right here. Because there is no bottom anymore.
U.S. Rep. Steve King invoked the story of Jesus Christ at a town hall in Cherokee, Iowa, on Tuesday, comparing his experience of being called out for racist remarks in the House of Representatives to Jesus’ trial and crucifixion.

“When I have to step down to the floor of the House of Representatives, and look up at those 400-and-some accusers — you know we just passed through Easter and Christ’s passion — and I have better insight into what He went through for us partly because of that experience,” the Iowa Republican said, referring to the biblical story of Jesus’ trek to Calvary and execution on a cross in Jerusalem.

King told the roughly 30 constituents at the town hall Tuesday that the prayers he has received from others have helped him through the tough time and given him a “certain peace,” the Sioux City Journal reported.

Friday, March 22, 2019

Calling Jake and Elwood: The Iowa Nazi edition

Truth in politics?
Rep. Steve King, National Socialist-Iowa, is at it again. No doubt, our national appetite for wallowing in political pig poop is fathomless.

The Washington Post is there with a shovel, as usual.

"We go to a place like New Orleans, and everybody’s looking around saying, ‘Who’s going to help me? Who’s going to help me?’” King said, recounting what he said officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, had told him about the relief effort, in which he said he had participated. Yet, he was also one of 11 members of Congress to oppose a bill providing federal aid to Katrina victims in 2005.

In his home state, he said, residents looked after one another without government handouts. Meanwhile, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds has declared a disaster in more than half of Iowa’s 99 counties because of severe flooding and is seeking a federal declaration that would free up funds from Washington.

“We go to a place like Iowa, and we go see, knock on the door at, say, I make up a name, John’s place, and say, ‘John, you got water in your basement, we can write you a check, we can help you,'" King said. “And John will say, ‘Well, wait a minute, let me get my boots. It’s Joe that needs help. Let’s go down to his place and help him.’”
THE NORMAL human response -- or what one would hope is the normal human response -- to the question "Who's going to help me?" is "I am."

King seems to admit as much by lauding Iowans' willingness to help their neighbors without hesitation. So, I suppose the only thing he finds offensive is that people would ask for help -- particularly from, one supposes, the federal government. Particularly the majority-black population of New Orleans.

Something tells me the right dishonorable white nationalist from Kiron will not be pressing FEMA to withhold aid from those of his constituents affected by flooding on grounds of "We can take care of this shit ourselves." This leaves us with the explanation that's left for what King said Thursday.

Steve King is a racist piece of that in which we've been wallowing since 2016.

Tuesday, May 02, 2017

Why they call it Counciltucky


In the Age of Trump, we Americans live in a giant tinderbox. And we're fighting over everything.

Black Lives Matter. Blue Lives Matter. All hell breaks loose when Blue Lives shoot unarmed Black Lives. These skirmishes break out amid the larger struggle over the strategic crossroads of race and inequality.

Also in these fraught times, the battle over the Rebel flag and Confederate monuments still rages, and Lost Cause aficionados still cry over their spilled "heritage" as they wave the Stars and Bars in the face of civilized humanity.

Sometimes, one stumbles into a situation where two or more of these things converge, which today quickly could become a Situation.

So . . . welcome to an impromptu pro-police demonstration in Council Bluffs, Iowa, following the fatal shooting of a Pottawattamie County sheriff's deputy -- white -- by an escaping inmate -- black. The gathering along Broadway Avenue consisted of members of a Facebook group for off-road enthusiasts -- at least two of whom also are enthusiasts for something else not usually associated with Iowans.

Iowans, that is, who aren't Republican congressmen named Steve King.

THE GROUP of Counciltuckians -- and displays like this are why people across the Missouri River call Council Bluffs Counciltucky -- waved at least a couple of Blue Lives Matter American flags, a couple of regular Star-Spangled Banners and. . . .

I swear to God, I didn't even know this was a thing.

. . . at least two Confederate battle flags that had been Blue Lives Matterized. In Iowa.

Again, by people not Steve King.


Are you seeing where this could all go horribly wrong? Are you sensing that at least a few of these folks, in addition to saying police lives matter, might be saying that black lives do not? And that one of the Molotov cocktails we Americans so love to use for a pepper game -- when you win, you lose -- is somehow part and parcel of cop killings.

I don't know about you, but my inclination is to ask the Rebel-flag wavers "What the hell are you thinking? Why the hell do you think this is appropriate? What exactly are you saying here?" I'm curious that way. I imagine the Blue Lives that these people seem to think Matter might like a bit of insight, themselves.

"Intelligence," I think they call that kind of information.


MANY REPORTERS might like to know, too. Then again, maybe not.

Too many journalists today operate under the same "narrative pressure" local TV reporters face at times like these. Dead cop. Ordinary folk show their love and support. Tears. Respect. Cue somber outro music. Fade to black.

Even so, I don't know how a reporter ignores the flag flying right in her face, but there you go.

Confederate flags do not fit The Narrative -- at least not in the Midwest. And I suspect that even in the former Confederate States of America, there would be hell to pay if they did. The descendants of slaves tend to get touchy when white folk celebrate a society predicated upon their ancestors' suffering.

And just like those who embrace the Rebel flag must let go more important things to take up a tainted standard, journalists who stick to the feelgood, feel-bad Narrative are, in their own ratings- and circulation-driven manner, doing exactly what Confederate enthusiasts do in the South and -- one presumes, because Counciltucky -- elsewhere. They whitewash fact so we might live an alluring lie where we all love the cops, the cops all love us, and everybody does it out of the goodness of our June and Ward Cleaver hearts.

In The Narrative, communities are good, communities pull together and no one scapegoats, stereotypes or has ulterior motives. Never mind those people waving the Rebel flags, banners the Channel 7 reporter seems to think will cease to exist if just she ignores them hard enough.

It would have been such a simple question: "The Blue Lives Matter American flags, I understand. But why the Confederate flags?"

It's a simple question that wasn't asked by reporters for the Omaha World-Herald, either, even though the newspaper made note of the flag-waving off-roaders and even ran a picture of them.

Sans Rebel flag, of course.

Perhaps the answer is the fewer questions you ask, the better off you are in post-truth Tinderbox America.

Until, of course, you aren't.

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

BREAKING NEWS: Bad news at the White House

VIDEO JUST IN: Far-right, anti-Muslim candidate Geert Wilders today lost his bid to oust Prime Minister Mark Rutte in the Netherlands. Fiery reaction at das Weiße Haus as Rep. Steve King (R -- Greater Iowa Reich) gives Obergruppenführer Donald Drumpf the bad news from The Hague.

Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Iowa uber alles


Iowa's crackpot congressman, Steve King, always has marched to the beat of a right-wing drummer.

He now apparently is goosestepping to an Anschluss beat, hobnobbing with a far-right leader of a political party founded by ex-Nazis in old Österreich. The candidate of the ironically named Freedom Party lost Austria's presidential runoff, but apparently its leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, still ist Nummer Eins in the heart of the Hawkeye State's korncob kommandant.

Strache, you see, will be attending the inauguration of Donald Trump as the guest of King. Let that sink in for a moment.
Rep. Steve King
Various media had reported that Hofer and Strache had been invited by Washington's conservative republican deputy, Steve King. King, who had already supported Trump in the election campaign, visited Vienna last October, where he met the then-Presidential candidate, Hofer. Now the confirmation.
Facebook knows about Strache:
"I was invited to Washington this week. As usual, I am accompanied by a Freedom Delegation on this trip.
On the margins of the US presidential election, a series of talks with interesting US political representatives is on our tight schedule."
(Translation by Google)
A STORY on an English-language Austrian news site is here.

Of course, this isn't the 4th District representative's first flirtation with the outrageous.

In 2010, King said he could "empathize" with a domestic terrorist who flew his small plane into an Internal Revenue Service field office in Austin, Texas, killing himself as well as an IRS manager and injuring 13 others.

That same year, during the final House battle to enact Obamacare, The New York Times quoted him as saying this:

“Let’s beat the other side to a pulp!” Rep. Steve King, Republican of Iowa, shouted to the last stand of Tea Partiers on Sunday night. “Let’s chase them down! There’s going to be a reckoning.”
In 2016, King attracted attention when a television report showed a small Confederate flag on his desk in Washington. Earlier, he had defended the Rebel flag as a "symbol" of Southern pride and decried efforts to ban the banner from official display:
“A huge price has been paid. It’s been paid primarily by Caucasian Christians. There are many who stepped up because they profoundly believed they needed to put an end to slavery,” said King. “This country has put this behind us.”
And less than a week later, on TV at the Republican National Convention, der Kongressabgeordnete went all master race on an MSNBC panel when someone mentioned the last gasp of "old white people" in the GOP.
This 'old white people' business does get a little tired, Charlie," King said. "I'd ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you're talking about, where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?"

"Than white people?" Hayes asked, clearly amazed.

"Than, than Western civilization itself," King replied. "It's rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. That's all of Western civilization."

The other panelists objected, with Hayes trying to keep the peace. Panelist April Ryan, who is black, asked, "What about Asia? What about Africa?"

"We're not going to argue the history of Western civilization," Hayes said. "Let me note for the record that if you're looking at the ledger of Western civilization, for every flourishing democracy, you have Hitler and Stalin as well."
WHEN IT comes to Steve King, I haven't even scratched the surface of the lowlights here. Believe me.

And now this.

Let me summarize "this": A congressman who can do nothing outrageous enough to alienate his constituents in Bumf***, Iowa, happens to be an enthusiastic supporter of Donald Trump, who could do nothing outrageous enough not to become the 45th president of the United States.

Then, the outrageous right-wing congressman invites an outrageous right-wing politico of a Nazi-birthed Austrian party (who late last year signed a cooperation pact with Vladimir Putin's United Russia party) to the swearing in of Trump, who has his own thing going with the Russians, whose geopolitical aim is to blow the Western alliance to hell and achieve complete Eurasian dominance.

No, nothing to see here. Move along to the showers for delousing.


IT WOULD SEEM to this schlub sitting at his computer in Omaha, by God, Nebraska, that the problem isn't that Steve King and Donald Trump are going to turn America fascist. It seems to me instead that the reason we have public disgraces like Steve King and Donald Trump at the forefront of American public life is because large swaths of our land already have gone fascist.

Folks hereabouts would deny that till the cows come home, and they'd probably want to sock me "in the goddamn face" for saying it. Of course, the other plausible explanation is that an electoral majority in Iowa's 4th and a winning electoral-college coalition nationally elected these two little Hitlers because they were too effing stupid and racist to manage otherwise.

If I were an King voter in western Iowa or a Trump enthusiast nationwide, I'd just cop to fascist.

For the rest of us, the Resistance begins Friday.

Wednesday, November 03, 2010

Right of the great divide


If you care to look at what kind of political climate we're facing these days, look no further than Rep. Steve King, western Iowa's crazy-uncle congressman.

In 2008, King -- a three-term representative for whom the description "incendiary" may well be an understatement -- won with 60 percent of the vote. Tuesday, he won with 68 percent.

In February, he was being glib about the guy who flew his plane into the IRS offices in Austin, Texas. Two years before, it was this:



AND THE good people of western Iowa like him just fine, according to today's Omaha World-Herald:
King is a staunch conservative known for eyebrow-raising comments. He expects the GOP takeover of the House of Representatives to lead to his becoming chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law. He is the senior Republican on the subcommittee.

He said Tuesday he wants to introduce legislation reducing and eventually ending federal aid to so-called “sanctuary cities” if they did not change their policies.

“We have a number of cities in our country that, essentially, forbid their law enforcement officers from gathering information on illegals,” he said. “We need to put an end to it.”

Cities — including Seattle, Los Angeles, Houston and San Francisco — have adopted ordinances banning city employees and police from asking residents about their immigration status. King described Des Moines as a “de-facto” sanctuary city where the practice is in place without an ordinance.

He also called for ending automatic citizenship for what he called “anchor babies,” children born in the United States to illegal-immigrant parents. Doing that would likely require changing the U.S. Constitution.
WHAT DEMOCRATS have to deal with isn't that King is a nut and attracts like addle-minded zealots. What Democrats have to deal with is that lots of normal people in the country's breadbasket keep electing a bomb-thrower like the congressman from Iowa's 5th Congressional District.

That they regard him as "normal" enough to represent them, and see Democrats as unfit.

What Democrats have to ask themselves is why they are so alienated from normal Midwestern folk -- angry, fearful, marginally knee-jerk and increasingly deluded folk, to be sure, but not particularly lunatic ones. Dismissing folks like Steve King's Iowa voters, deriding them as bigots and nuts, may be satisfying for the Democratic base, but it still amounts to pissing in the wind.

The difficult question that some Democrats need to ask themselves, but won't, isn't
"Why is everybody but us so crazy?" The pertinent question, instead, is "Why do people find us significantly more frightening than somebody like Steve King?"

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars . . ." etc., and so on.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Iowa's King-sized mess


Southwestern Iowa, can we talk?

Surely you've noticed lately that your guy in the U.S. House, Steve King, has been a little out of control . . . even by his own loose standards. Frankly, guys, the rest of the country is starting to think he's a little nuts.

OK, a lot nuts.

He's going around throwing rhetorical bombs. He's acts like he's trying to start something bad, trying to get people all riled up.

Frankly, if the tea partiers actually got their way and got national governance just the way the Founding Fathers served it up . . . your representative might be writing manifestos on toilet paper for his lawyer to smuggle out of jail and hand over to Glenn Beck. The Alien and Sedition Acts, as applied by President John Adams, surely would not have been kind to Steve King.


LET'S TAKE a look at Steve King's latest, greatest hits, shall we? Starting with this story today in the Omaha World-Herald:
Midlands Republicans on Capitol Hill strongly opposed health care legislation, but most showed little interest this week in repealing it now that it is the law of the land.

One man who is ready for a repeal push is Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa.

“Today the work begins to repeal Obamacare and restore the principles of liberty that made America a great nation,” King said within hours of the bill's passage. “The American people must take their country back by methodically eliminating every vestige of creeping socialism, including socialized medicine.”

Of course, repeal would be a steep climb. Republicans probably would need to capture the White House, a majority in the House and 60 seats in the Senate, where they currently hold 41.
THEN, WE HAVE this from KTIV in Sioux City:


AND THIS, an account of King's Sunday night antics, courtesy of The New York Times:
“Let’s beat the other side to a pulp!” Rep. Steve King, Republican of Iowa, shouted to the last stand of Tea Partiers on Sunday night. “Let’s chase them down! There’s going to be a reckoning.”
OF COURSE, let us not forget this, as recounted by CBS News:
Conservative lawmakers and pundits already have many grievances against the Democratic health care reform plan, but Rep. Steve King of Iowa and Fox News personality Glenn Beck are adding one more to the list -- the vote scheduled for Sunday.

Democrats are scrambling to get the bill to the president before leaving for Easter recess, prompting the House to schedule a vote for the bill this Sunday.

"They intend to vote on the Sabbath, during Lent, to take away the liberty that we have right from God," King said on Beck's radio program Thursday, the Hill reports.

Beck chimed in, "Here is a group of people that have so perverted our faith and our hope and our charity, that is a -- this is an affront to God."
OR THIS, in The Huffington Post on March 16:
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) urged a smaller-than-expected crowd of Tea Party protesters on Tuesday to launch a Velvet Revolution-style uprising against the federal government, saying the parallels are striking between America's current government and Eastern European communist rule.

Speaking to the Huffington Post shortly after his speech, King declared that a peaceful uprising, a la the successful overthrowing of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia on the streets of Prague in 1989 "would be fine with me."

"Fill this city up, fill this city, jam this place full so that they can't get in, they can't get out and they will have to capitulate to the will of the American people," he said.

"So this is just like Prague under communist rule?" the Huffington Post asked.

"Oh yeah, it is very, very close," King replied. "It is the nationalization of our liberty and the federal government taking our liberty over. So there are a lot of similarities there."

Earlier, King implored the crowd to bring the nation's capital to a sort of paralysis. Warning, erroneously, that the health care bill would fund abortion and fund care for 6.1 million illegal immigrants, he demanded that concerned citizens "continue to rise up."
AND, OF COURSE, we can't overlook this "Osama bin King" moment after Joe Stack flew his plane into Internal Revenue Service offices in Austin, Texas, last month:


SOUTHWEST IOWA, let me be direct. You have a problem -- you elected a lunatic. Furthermore, considering you elected a lunatic to Congress, he's our problem, too.

And we expect you to fix our problem at your earliest possible convenience.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Osama bin King, R-Iowa

Remember how mad you were when you saw Palestinians celebrating on 9/11?

Steve King, southwest Iowa's mad-hatter member of Congress, is one of those people. Just so long as the target for the terrorist's flying bomb is the Internal Revenue Service.

ACCORDING to Talking Points Memo, the Iowegian carbuncle on the House's ass told a panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference he could "empathize" with a domestic terrorist like Tea Party Airlines pilot Joe Stack:
King's comments weren't recorded, but a staffer for Media Matters, who heard the comments, provided TPMmuckraker with an account.

The staffer, who requested anonymity because she's not a communications specialist, said that King, an extreme right-winger with a reputation for eyebrow-raising rhetoric, appeared as a surprise guest speaker on an immigration panel at the conservative conference. During his closing remarks, King veered into a complaint about high taxes, and said he could "empathize" with the man who flew a plane into an IRS building last week.

During the question and answer session, the Media Matters staffer asked King to clarify his comment, reminding him of his sworn duty to protect the American people from all sworn enemies, foreign and domestic. In response, said the staffer, King gave a long and convoluted answer about having been personally audited by the IRS, and ended by saying he intended to hold a fundraiser to help people "implode" their local IRS office.

HELL, we invaded Iraq on flimsier evidence than that regarding Saddam Hussein's supposed support for al-Qaida. What to make of a sitting congressman who can "empathize" with domestic terrorists who launch suicide attacks against the United States government?

When confronted by Think Progress about his remarks, King said that if we just hadn't built the World Trade Center and Pentagon, those 9/11 suicide jockeys wouldn't have had anywhere to aim those jetliners full of innocent Americans.
Or something like that:

I think if we’d abolished the IRS back when I first advocated it, he wouldn’t have a target for his airplane. And I’m still for abolishing the IRS, I’ve been for it for thirty years and I’m for a national sales tax.

(snip)

It’s sad the incident in Texas happened, but by the same token, it’s an agency that is unnecessary and when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the IRS, it’s going to be a happy day for America.

WITH THE political heat now on high, King took the weasel route in an interview published in this morning's Omaha World-Herald:
King said his heart goes out to the victims in Austin and their families.

“These acts of violence have no place in our society to be condoned or supported,” King told The World-Herald. “When someone finds themselves in this position of extreme frustration with the IRS, which I do understand that frustration, they should do what I did, get involved in the process.”

King said his treatment by the IRS contributed to his decision to run for public office.

As for the comments about imploding IRS buildings, King said he was employing levity in discussing his belief that the IRS should be abolished. He said he was referring to imploding the empty buildings left behind.
YEAH, RIGHT.

You know, if only the voters of southwest Iowa hadn't elected such a radical asshat to Congress, we who live across the Missouri River in Nebraska wouldn't point our fingers eastward and laugh so hard.

Maybe we should stop that, though. Terrorist-loving creeps like King -- especially when they get elected to high office -- hardly are a laughing matter.