The Clown Award, given for meritorious stupidity.This week's dishonoree is Iowa congressman Steve King, one of those people that in a sane world would not so much be laughed off the public stage as be gently removed and put somewhere where he could do no harm to the general level of public intelligence - and who, by the same token, makes you despair for the future when you remember that people actually vote for this steaming mass of putrefaction.
Consider, for example, that in July he said that President Barack Obama's mother "might've announced his birth by telegram from Kenya" to Hawaii, this being the birthers' explanation of how, if Obama was born in Kenya, his birth announcement appeared at the time in two papers in Hawaii.
In August he declared that "liberals" had so "devalued life" that, he said, a man can rape a young girl, kidnap her, force her to undergo an abortion across state lines, and then “drop her off at the swingset ... and that’s not against the law in the United States of America.”
Later in August, he was one of the few GOPpers who publicly supported Todd Akin, the nitwit who said that women can't get pregnant from rape because if it's "legitimate" rape, the woman's body "has ways of shutting that whole thing down." Not one to be out-stupided, King went further and denied ever hearing about anyone getting pregnant from statutory rape or incest, either.
But give him this: He is fully prepared to totally embrace his wacko wingnuttery. In an interview on Sunday, October 21 with local station WHO-TV, he went right for it.
He repeated his comparison of immigrants to dogs, saying immigration policy should be like a dog buyer choosing "the pick of the litter." He even insisted that was a compliment and the people who objected knew it was a compliment but are just "professional hyperventilators." He dodged his earlier birther statement, claiming he was just expressing the concerns of others, but then added that he "doesn't know" where Obama was born.
He doubled down on claims that Huma Abedin, a senior advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, calling that "the objective truth." He urged an investigation and hinted that this supposed Islamic influence could have had something to do with the administration's policy in Libya.
Finally, he also said has no position on whether states should be allowed to ban the sale of contraceptives - not to ban abortion, but to ban the sale of contraceptives, while suggesting that Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 SCOTUS decision that established a right to privacy as a Constitutional principle, was wrongly decided.
And at that interview, he did all this in literally just four minutes. Truly a tour-de-force of clownishness.
Iowa congressman Steve King, recognized by the Southern Poverty Law Center as one of the 15 most extremist candidates for public office in the US in 2012, Seven King: clown.
Sources:
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/21/rep_steve_king_on_goes_wingnut_roll/
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/21/fourteen_most_extremist_candidates/?source=newsletter
http://www.splcenter.org/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/21/steve-king-immigrants-dogs_n_1998007.html
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/08/01/622881/steve-king-responds-dogfighting/
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/08/21/721321/rep-steve-king-says-hes-never-heard-of-a-rape-induced-pregnancy/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griswold_v._Connecticut
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