Buffoon Watch: Steve King's Greatest Hits

He can't be for real, can he? Alas, all too real.

by Noah

There are two Steve Kings of at least some renown in our society. One is Stephen King, the world-famous writer of horror. The other is Rep. Steven King of Iowa. He is a monster for real.

Rep. Steven King has a special talent for articulating what the Republican Party stands for. That talent has led to his prominence in the party. Tim Moran, a former Iowa GOP State Central Committee member thinks King should run for senator, saying the Republican Party might find it ". . . refreshing to have Steve King at the top of a ticket to drive the message and definition of the party."


KING OF BUFFOON-O-RAMA

This past weekend Representative King was the cohost of the so-called Iowa Freedom Summit, aka Buffoon-o-Rama 2015, designed to kick off the 2016 Republican presidential primary season. Most of the usual suspects were there, including "The Donald" and his hair Sarah Palin with her special talent for speaking complete gibberish,  and neo-fascist Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Mittens Romney and John Ellis "Jeb" Bush chose not to attend, presumably to try to convince us that they are not as buffoonish as the other participants.

But King was in his self-proclaimed glory, acting as a combination ten-ring master of ceremonies and smarmy game show host. He even made sure to have his name emblazoned on the front of the podium as if it was the seal of the president of the United States. If you read the following selections from King's ever-expanding list of greatest hits, you will see that when it comes to heading up a confab of buffoons, Representative Steve is at the top of his class and a perfect choice. The following is just a small, but I think representative, sample of Steven King's Greatest Hits. There is so much more, and no doubt there will be so much more to come.


1. ON ANIMAL CRUELTY

Do you like dogfighting and cockfighting? If you are of the Michael Vick persuasion and enjoy throwing animals in a pit and watching the blood squirt, Representative King is your man! He has led the fights in Congress to block legislation that would crack down on such barbarism. During discussions of the 2012 farm bill, it was King who led the fight against an amendment that would make it a crime for an adult to attend or to bring a child to a dogfight or cockfight. In 2007 he had opposed House bill H.R.137, which made it a felony to transport animals or cockfighting implements across state lines for the purpose of fighting.

King is one of the few lawmakers of either party who opposed including pets in disaster planning. He also voted against the 111th Congress's H.R.80, a bill written to prohibit interstate and foreign commerce in primates for the pet trade.

There's a whole lot more where this type of thing came from, but you get the picture. Basically, if something protects an animal somewhere, Representative King is against it, even more so than some members of his own party.


2. ON SAME-SEX MARRIAGE

In 2003, Sioux City (Iowa) Judge Jeffrey Neary granted two lesbians a divorce. King's response was:

Unicorns, leprechauns, gay marriages in Iowa; these are all things you will never find because they just don't exist. But perhaps Judge Neary would grant divorces to unicorns and leprechauns too.

Same-sex marriage became legal in Iowa six years later, in 2009. Like his party, Representative King is a man of no vision.



3. ON IMMIGRATION

King is clearly his party's leader on anti-immigration matters. One of his most famous statements about immigration -- and there are many of them -- is what is known as "the cantaloupe comment." Referring to immigrant children coming across our borders, he said:

For every one who's a valedictorian, there's another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds and they've got calves the size of cantaloupes because they're hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.

King has also compared Mexican immigrants, documented and undocumented alike, to dogs:

You want a good bird dog? You want one that's going to be aggressive? [P]ick the one that's the friskiest . . . not the one that's over there sleeping in the corner. . .&nbsp. You get the pick of the litter.

We already know about what Representative King thinks of dogs. I suspect such a man would like to set up "Mexican fighting pits" that would be just like cockfights and dogfights. Maybe they'll have that at the 2016 Republican Convention and Hatefest.


4. ON GLOBAL WARMING

King has called climate change " more of a religion than a science."  He has repeatedly demonstrated his contempt for science and his complete lack of understanding of the issue. He is not even smarter than a fifth grader. Perhaps his arrogance about the subject is best pointed out by this quote: "I spent a lot of my life cold. It felt pretty good to get warmed up."



5. ON CONTRACEPTION

King is a key player in the Republican anti-contraception movement. He has made a lot of noise objecting to the idea that Obamacare could cover birth control for women as a free preventive service without a copay. Says he:

Well, if you applied that preventative medicine universally, what you end up with is you've prevented a generation. Preventing babies from being born is not medicine. That's not constructive to our culture and our civilization. If we let our birth rate get down below replacement rate, we're a dying civilization.

This statement is a classic example of an extremist using extremist thinking. Dying civilization? Hardly. As it is now, the U.S. population is 312 million people, and it's on course to reach 439 million by 2050. To turn that pace into a dying civilization would require a staggering amount of contraception use, an amount way, way beyond what the Obamacare provision would realistically lead to.

As far as I'm concerned, the best solution to the population problem, at least in this country, would be for Republicans to immediately stop procreating. It would solve a lot of other problems too!


FOR FURTHER READING --

As I indicated, the above barely scratches the surface of Representative King and what a perfect one-person embodiment of the Republican Party philosophy he is. You can click on the DWT "Steve King" label below for some of our favorites. Then here are a couple of suggestions for further reading:

• "Steve King: Gays Wouldn't Face Discrimination If They Didn't 'Wear Their Sexuality On Their Sleeve'" (HuffPost Politics, December 2010)

and especially:

• "Right-Wing Demands Obama Fire Kevin Jennings for Helping Gay Teens Not Kill Themselves" (Julie Farby, HuffPost Politics, March 2010, updated May 2011)


SCHEDULE NOTE: Next post at 7pm PT/10pm ET

#

Crackpot Utopia: The Year in Republican Crazy, Part 6

• And now a word about South Carolina
• Pat Robertson and his magic asteroid
• I'll have a pack of Twizzlers and an IUD to go, please


Eight-year-old South Carolinian Olivia McConnell (see No. 1, Exhibit B) thinks she's so-o-o smart just 'cause she's smarter than the whole of her state's GOP. Okay, she's only eight, so she doesn't realize that this isn't all that remarkable a feat.

Crackpot Utopia: A dream world as envisioned by republicans; a manifestation or expression of the deranged, warped alternate universe inhabited by republicans, at least in their minds. See also: Bachmannism, Boehneresque.

by Noah

1. And now a word about South Carolina!

There are a lotta nuts out there. Sometimes they band together and form whole states. When it came to all of that secession talk after the 2012 presidential election, South Carolina worked hard to not be outdone by fellow nut states Texas, Mississippi, and Alaska. Hell, they've even elected Lindsey Graham as one of their U.S. senators, more than once! And let's not forget that, at Fort Sumter, they started the Civil War, which for them has never ended.

But, putting all of that aside, let's just look at two exhibits from South Carolina from this past year. Keep in mind that some republicans will say defensively that the true crazies are in some sort of vast minority within their party. Always ask yourself, who puts the crazies in power?

Exhibit A: Meet Todd Kincannon

Um, "LEGAL CORRESPONANT"?
Is this some kind of secret code?

In the midst of the preelection media scare campaign on the subject of Ebola, Todd Kincannon, former executive director of the SC GOP, went even more full-blown-wacko than any of the usual suspects from FOX, CNN, or the talk radio asylum. Here's Kincannon on Twitter, vying for his Crazyspeak of ohe Year trophy:

People with Ebola in the U.S. need to be put down humanely immediately.

Well, at least he said "humanely." I suppose that does separate him from a lot of his republican brethren, who wouldn't care about being humane. But then he added:

The protocol for a positive Ebola test should be immediate execution and sanitation of the whole area. That will save lives.

  Kincannon, who claims to be "pro-life," also managed to blame the spread of Ebola on the people of Africa, who, in his deranged crackpot republican mind, have been "eating each other." Well, you know how they are.

(By the way, did you notice how the subject of an impending Ebola pandemic -- Obama's fault, again -- disappeared completely from the so-called liberal media the day after Election Day?)

Kincannon doesn't just get all repug over Ebola. If you click on the provided Daily Kos link, you'll find some choice four- and five-letter words to describe one of his party's favorite targets for hate and demonization, Nancy Pelosi. He also has some special republican wisdom on the vagina of Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis. I could go on about that, but I covered the Republican Party's ever-continuing War on Women in Part 4.

Exhibit B: The SC GOP and the fossils

We all know how republicans feel about nasty things like females, education, and dreaded (dare I say it?) science. But in third-grader Olivia McConnell the South Carolina republican party was set up as the paradigm for utter derangement by one inquisitive eight-year-old who obviously has more smarts than almost her whole state put together. Here's what happened when the budding paleontologist butted heads with her state's paleo-republicans.

Olivia, who loves hunting for fossils everywhere she goes, found out that one of the very first fossils found in America, an ancient mammoth, was unearthed right in her own home state of South Carolina. At the same time, she found out that her state was one of only seven states in our whole country that had no designated state fossil. So Olivia set out to rectify the situation by writing a nice letter to SC Gov. Nikki Haley and other state lawmakers, including her state representative, Robert Ridgeway, and her state senator, Kevin Johnson, both Democrats. Said Olivia:

I wanted it to be the state fossil because I didn't want that history to be lost, and our state not to get credit for it.

Both Ridgeway and Johnson loved the idea. What could go wrong?

Enter the republicans, the party of obstructionism and total kookery. The proposal actually passed the state's House by a huge margin, a bipartisan margin, but then, when it went to the state Senate, republican senators, led by Kevin Bryant -- a creationist who has compared President Obama to Osama bin Laden, voted to block a rape crisis center, and called climate change a hoax -- insisted that any proposal designating the mammoth as the state fossil not only must include a reference to said mammoth's creator, aka God, but also must mention that the mammoth in question, like all mammoths, was "created on the sixth day with the other beasts of the field." In fact, Bryant and fellow republican Sen. Mike Fair wanted three -- count 'em, three -- verses from the Book of Genesis added to any designation of the mammoth as the state fossil. Why not just ship it with a Bible?

The Book of Genesis also implies that the mammoth and everything else, including mankind, came into being 6000 years ago. But mammoths went extinct, probably hunted to extinction by us two-legged critters, about 10,000 years ago. Damn, that math and science thing gets tricky when you're a republican.

Eventually, the bill became law, with the sixth-day reference but without mention of any gods or God. Perhaps little Olivia McConnell should have just proposed that Senator Bryant be named the state fossil.


Nuttier than a Columbian mammoth? That's our Kevin.


2. Pat Robertson and his magic asteroid
(Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 6)

Any chance that the age in question
is the Age of Republican Crazy?

Again, let us not think that the über-crazy Pat Robertson is some sort of fringe republican. No, this loon has quite a legion of followers within his party. In fact, he has frequently been put forward as "presidential material" in republican primaries and in discussions of top republican leaders. So, with that in mind, I give you yet another Great Moment In Pat Robertson. The man is a Crazyspeak Award nomination machine!

I wrote a book. I wrote a book. It's called The End of the Age and it deals with an asteroid hitting the Earth.

OK. So far, not so bad. But then --

I don't see anything else that fulfills the prophetic words of Jesus Christ other than an asteroid strike. There isn't anything that will cause the seas to roil, that will cause the skies to darken, the moon and sun not to give their light, the nations terrified on Earth saying "what's happening?"

And then Mr. Doomsday said, as Mr. Doomsdays have been saying for thousands of years, always recalculating the date of our doom when the big day doesn't come:

Hey, just get ready. Get right and stay right with the Lord. It could be next week. . . .

Yeah! It's Chicken Little yelling, "The sky is falling. The sky is falling." But in that story, people stopped believing Chicken Little. In this story, they send him money.


It's almost unfair to the other contenders to consider the Reverend Pat for the Crazyspeak of the Year Award. As long as he draws breath, won't he have to be a favorite?


3. I'll have a pack of Twizzlers and an IUD to go!



2014 was the year that New York's reactionary Cardinal Timothy Dolan and his FOX "News" disciples, among others on the right, informed us that women can obtain birth control by walking into "any shop on any street in America."

This was all about the Hobby Lobby case. Hobby Lobby objected to a provision in Obamacare that said employers had to include contraception in their benefits packages. To Hobby Lobby, that ran against their religious beliefs and it was off-to-the-courts time. The idea that women might want birth control for health reasons was ignored, but, hey, they're women and there's a war on. Eventually, the so-called Supreme Court sided with Hobby Lobby.

But, every shop in town? Who knew? This is wonderful news! Dolan says 7-Eleven is an example. Who else? Dunkin' Donuts? The Dollar Store? Will shoe stores, now that we have Obamacare eating away at the moral fiber of America, be luring in women with offers of contraceptives with each pair of shoes purchased? All I can say is, it's about time!

Dolan's side won this one. Chalk one up for the nosy morality police. So, with them now emboldened, will we have to worry that the next complaint from Dolan will be that batteries are so readily available and that women should not be allowed to purchase batteries without a note from their priest?


COMING UP: Speaking of batteries, right now Noah is recharging his. He says he's not done, though, that there's more 2014 Republican crazy to come. Isn't there always more Republican crazy to come?

NOAH'S 2014 IN REVIEW --
Crackpot Utopia: The Year in Republican Crazy

Part 1: Princess Liz Cheney tries for the Smoothie of the Year Award; "Miss Beck regrets" -- Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 1: Glenn Beck; and the Crackpot Party reacts to President Obama’s State of the Union speech [12/19/2014]
Part 2: Republicans wonder why normal people call them racists; Sean Hannity wants to self-deport; and the First Annual Mr. Burns Award, to ABC "shark" Kevin O'Leary [12/20/2014]
Part 3: Using fear, loathing, and paranoia to sell stuff; Arizona legalizes crack!; and Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 3: Bill O’Reilly [12/21/2014]
Part 4: A celebration of Michele Bachmann: Pray away the crazy?; What "War on Women"?; and the "Obama angle" on Malaysian Flight 370 [12/22/2014]
Part 5: The GOP and the kiss heard 'round the world; Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 5: Joe the Plumber [12/23/2014]
Part 6: A word about South Carolina; Pat Robertson and his magic asteroid; and I'll have a pack of Twizzlers and an IUD to go, please [12/24/2014]
Part 7: And so it begins: The running of the buffoons; Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 7, George Will has no idea what rape is; and Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 8, Rick Wiles calls for a coup [12/29/2014]
Part 8: Things to come: Forward into the past! (11 Presidential Dream Tickets); Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 9: Former republican VP nominee Paul "Crazy Eyes" Ryan; Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 10: Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association [12/30/2014]
Part 9: Pompous Blowhard of the Year Award: Bill O’Reilly; FOX "News" announces new spinoff: the "FOX Benghazi™" Shopping Channel!; Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 11: DiGiorno Pizza [12/31/2014]
Part 10: Newsmax -- Beyond Drudgery; and Crazyspeak of the Year nominees Nos. 12 and 13: Michele Bachmann, Kimberly Guilfoyle [1/1/2015]
Part 11: GOP and FOX whip up the hate over a POW exchange; and Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 14: Iowa asylum escapee Rep. Steve King [1/3/2015]
Part 12: Arizona Republican protests busload of YMCA campers; Crazyspeak of the Year nominee(s) No. 15: the Impeachment Variations (group nomination); Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 16: NM Rep. Steve Pearce [1/4/2015]
Part 13 (and last): TV for Dummies: Sarah Palin launches her own channel; Crazyspeak of the Year nominee No. 17: Arizona schools superintendent John Huppenthal (rhymes with Neanderthal); and the final Crazyspeak of the Year nominee -- and also the winner! [1/5/2015]

NOAH'S 2013 IN REVIEW --
A Prayer to the Janitor of Lunacy

For listings and links, see Part 1 of this year's series.

#

Cory Gardner…The Far Right's Very Own Champion Of Free Sex?

Cory Gardner has never tried to sell himself as anything but a hard core right-wing ideologue. His district, CO-04 is the eastern third of the state, most of it the part that wants to secede. It's 91% white and very, very Republican. The R+11 district gave Romney a 210,019 (59%) to 140,855 (39%) victory over Obama-- even while Obama was winning the whole state, 51-46%. As we explained last month, Gardner never had any reason to paint himself as a moderate or even a mainstream Republican. His reputation is hard right. Part of the deal to get him the Republican Senate nomination this year was to give lunatic fringe teabagger Ken Buck the congressional district. The crackpots who live there have no problem with that and the DCCC isn't contesting the seat or backing the local Democrat who's running against Buck.

If Gardner has been known for one thing, it's been his fanaticism when it comes to opposing women's Choice. His ProgressivePunch lifetime vote score on abortion is ZERO and his ProgressivePunch lifetime vote score on availability of contraception is also ZERO. In the eyes of the fanatic anti-Choice fringe, you don't get any better than two fat zeroes. Well, one thing was better… he was a sponsor of a so-called personhood amendment, the most radical right anti-Choice move short of bombing a clinic or murdering an abortion doctor. Gardner wanted to give fertilized eggs the same rights as people. That even failed in Mississippi! That didn't stop Gardner from co-sponsoring legislation in Congress to make it the law for the entire country.

But now Gardner is running not among a bunch of lunatics in the High Plains who listen to Fox, Hannity, Limbaugh and religionist claptrap all day, but in his first statewide election, in a state that has been trending away from extremists like himself. So he tossed aside the whole Personhood thing, claiming, incongruously, that he never really understood what it meant. Oh, and when the voters voted on Gardner's Personhood Amendment in 2010, it lost 71-29%. Many on the far right see him as a flip-flopper and worse. But worse was yet to come-- for them. See that ad up top? It's the new avatar of free love, Cory Gardner. He's trying to woo the women of Colorado as their champion.

Yesterday, trailing Democrat Mark Udall, Gardner released that bizarre new ad embracing the pill. Will anyone believe it? Will he get tarred as an opportunist? How much damage will it do him on his right flank? The Denevr Post ran the ad-- along with a press release from Udall's campaign:

Congressman Gardner today released a jaw-dropping ad in which he claims he wants to expand access to birth control, despite still supporting a bill to ban it. Gardner is a cosponsor of the Life at Conception Act, the federal Personhood bill that would ban common forms of birth control in addition to outlawing abortion nationwide.

“Congressman Gardner will do anything to hide his backwards agenda from Colorado women,” said Udall for Colorado spokesperson Kristin Lynch. “The undeniable fact is Gardner continues to push radical, anti-woman measures that would ban common forms of birth control. One 30-second ad doesn’t make up for that.”

FactCheck.org, PersonhoodUSA, and Planned Parenthood have all weighed in and confirmed that Gardner’s bill in Congress is the same as the statewide ballot measures that Coloradans twice rejected by overwhelming margins.

Just keep in mind if you're trying to sort this out in your mind and trying to figure out what Cory Gardner really stands for, if his bill were to ever pass, a doctor performing an abortion on a woman who was raped could face a harsher sentence than the rapist. That's the twisted Republican position that has turned Cory Gardner into a pretzel.

Even In Oklahoma They Can't Always Escape Reality-- The GOP War Against Contraception (And Sex)

Oklahoma state Rep. Doug Cox (R-OK) is the chairman of the Public Health and Social Services Committee. First elected in 2005, he's also a physician who graduated from the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine in 1978. If you think every Republican in Oklahoma is as radical and extreme as GOP sociopath James Lankford, you haven't met Doug Cox yet. Last February, Rep. Cox-- who, unlike lunatic freak Dr. Paul Broun, is the kind of doctor who actually does believe in science-- took on his party over a very extreme anti-abortion bill meant to eliminate the judicial bypass system for young victims of incest and violence seeking abortion care. He told his fellow legislators at that time that if "we keep passing stuff like this, they'll be done in back alleys with coat hangers, people… [Abortions] are done in clinics inspected by the Health Department under sterile, medical condition. This bill basically is trying to intimidate the providers who do those." He lost the argument.

Three months later he penned a letter to the editor to his local paper about the stepped-up Republican Party jihad against contraception. [If you skipped it,now's the time to watch the Rachel Maddow video above.] This is Rep. Cox's letter. Let me remind you, he's a Republican… in Oklahoma-- from the same town as James Lankford.

All of the new Oklahoma laws aimed at limiting abortion and contraception are great for the Republican family that lives in a gingerbread house with a two-car garage, two planned kids and a dog. In the real world, they are less than perfect.

As a practicing physician (who never has or will perform an abortion), I deal with the real world. In the real world, 15- and 16-year-olds get pregnant (sadly, 12-, 13- and 14-year-olds do also). In the real world, 62 percent of women ages 20 to 24 who give birth are unmarried. And in the world I work and live in, an unplanned pregnancy can throw up a real roadblock on a woman's path to escaping the shackles of poverty.

Yet I cannot convince my Republican colleagues that one of the best ways to eliminate abortions is to ensure access to contraception. A recent attempt by my fellow lawmakers to prevent Medicaid dollars from covering the “morning after” pill is a case in point. Denying access to this important contraceptive is a sure way to increase legal and back-alley abortions. Moreover, such a law would discriminate against low-income women who depend on Medicaid for their health care.

But wait, some lawmakers want to go even further and limit everyone's access to birth control by allowing pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for contraception.

What happened to the Republican Party that I joined? The party where conservative presidential candidate Barry Goldwater felt women should have the right to control their own destiny? The party where President Ronald Reagan said a poor person showing up in the emergency room deserved needed treatment regardless of ability to pay? What happened to the Republican Party that felt government should not overregulate people until (as we say in Oklahoma) “you have walked a mile in their moccasins”?

Is my thinking too clouded by my experiences in the real world? Experiences like having a preacher, in the privacy of an exam room say, “Doc, you have heard me preach against abortion but now my 15-year-old daughter is pregnant, where can I send her?” Or maybe it was that 17-year-old foreign exchange student who said, “I really made a mistake last night. Can you prescribe a morning-after pill for me? If I return to my home country pregnant, life as I know it will be over.”

What happened to the Republican Party that felt that the government has no business being in an exam room, standing between me and my patient? Where did the party go that felt some decisions in a woman's life should be made not by legislators and government, but rather by the women, her conscience, her doctor and her God?

Cox, R-Grove, has delivered more than 800 babies.

Republicans, even extreme right Oklahoma Republicans of the Lankford variety, aren't exactly the same as the patriarchs who want to bring back stoning as a mechanism for controlling women in Afghanistan. Not exactly… but almost. Sex is as threatening and frightening to them as it is to the primitive Afs. I bet they don't like people like Rachel Maddow-- or Doug Cox-- reminding them. The progressive Democrat running for the Oklahoma City seat Lankford is occupying now, Tom Guild, has similar motivations to Cox, even if they're from different parties. For one thing, Tom is not a big fan of government intrusion into people's private lives.

Representative Cox hits the nail squarely on the head. Today’s Republican Party pursues legislation that outlaws common forms of birth control. The inevitable fallout from this government intrusion into private matters greatly increases the demand for abortion following unplanned and preventable pregnancies. Today’s GOP has forgotten that their hero, Ronald Reagan, was famous for saying he wanted to get the government off of our backs. Big Brother is alive and well in today’s GOP.

Do we really want the police searching the sacred marital bedroom for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? Do we really want poor women to be denied the fundamental right to make their own personal health decisions? Do we need to destroy women’s economic opportunities because of admittedly regrettable decisions, where the rigid and unforgiving law strictly refuses any reasonable remedy? America doesn’t need a Taliban Party. What America needs is a responsible Republican Party that gets off of its condescending high horse and lives in the real world for a change, and gets the government off of American women’s backs, and out of America’s bedrooms.