8.9 - Clown of the Year Award 2016, Total Jackassery Category: GOPper Rep. Steve King

Clown of the Year Award 2016, Total Jackassery Category: GOPper Rep. Steve King

Our other Clown of the Year Award is the Total Jackassery category and oh, my did we have some competition.

For example, we had right-wing attorney and self-described "no fan of government" Kory Langhofer, who said in February that Justice Antonin Skeletor's opinion on cases then pending before the Supreme Court should still count even though he died before the court took its final vote.

To repeat, in case you're wondering if you heard right: Langhofer is proposing that Skeletor should have gotten a vote on cases still pending before the Court despite laboring under the handicap of being dead, as deceased as Monty Python's parrot.

Then there was the case of Florida Gov. Rick Scott, or, as we know him around here, Voldemeort, who proved you can be a crybaby and a bully at the same time.

A woman named Cara Jennings gave him quite an earful when she encountered him in a Starbucks one day, berating him for not doing enough to help people and for a failure to create good jobs. Someone videoed part of the encounter and posted it. Jennings had nothing to do with that.

Nonetheless, a video hit piece on Cara Jennings quickly appeared. The clear result of some quick oppo research, the video was done by Voldemort's political action committee and was put up on his official YouTube channel. That is, the governor of Florida used the resources of his political campaign machine to launch a personal attack on an individual private citizen because she had the temerity to mouth off to him in a Starbucks.

What could top examples like those? Who could be a bigger jackass than either of those two?

Well, early in the year New Hampshire state Representative Josh Moore almost looked like a shoo-in, but he had to settle for Dishonorable Mention.

New Hampshire, it develops, is one of the 33 US states that do not have a law against women going topless in public and this, amid all the other problems facing any state, this is the crisis that Moore determined needed to be addressed. He introduced a bill to make a woman showing her nipples in public a case of "lewdness" and "public indecency" with repeat offenders having to register as sex offenders.

When State Representative Amanda Bouldin objected to the bill, Moore responded on Facebook by saying "If it's a woman's natural inclination to pull her nipple out in public and you support that, then you should have no problem with a man's inclination to stare at it and grab it."

Stare? Grab it? What kind of numbskull pervert would even propose such a response? What is wrong with you?

Actually, we do know what's wrong with Josh Moore. He's a jackass.

Now obviously, someone would have to reach way up to beat that, but someone did, someone who is a true champion at being a clown.

So the winner for Clown of the Year, Total Jackassery category, is GOPper Rep. Steve King of Iowa.

Rep. Steve King

During the GOPper national convention in July, he was on an MSNBC panel moderated by Chris Hayes along with White House correspondent April Ryan and Charles Pierce, a writer for Esquire.

When Pierce said that the convention hall "is wired by loud, unhappy, dissatisfied white people," King said Pierce should "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?"

Hayes, clearly taken aback, asked King "Than white people?" to which our champion clown said "than Western civilization," which he then described as "rooted in western Europe, eastern Europe and the United States of America" - in other words, essentially white people - "and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world."

Beyond the fact that the roots of the very concept of "civilization" as we understand the term lie in Mesopotamia, the site of the world's first settled communities, and leaving aside such non-Western creations as, to cite just a few, astronomy, monetary systems, ink, paper, clocks, the compass, hospitals, the first university, and oh, yeah, our modern system of mathematics, which has made our entire modern world possible, unless you would rather be balancing your checkbook in Roman numerals, there is something else that the non-western world contributed, something that Steve King would surely regard as a contribution: Christianity.

My gosh, looking at Steve King it is hard to believe that so little rational knowledge could be in such a fat head.

Steve King, Clown of the Year 2016, Total Jackassery Category.