Fellow Iowan, US Representative and probable crazy person Steve King appeared on G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show Monday, where he discussed Liddy’s role in the Watergate break-in President Obama’s systemic racism. Mad props to Jacek for the link. According to King, Obama’s policies consistently favor blacks over whites. At least, that’s what can be gleaned from this series of words that he said: “The president has demonstrated that he has a default mechanism in him that breaks down the side of race on the side that favors the black person in the case of professor Gates and officer Crowley.” Later in the program, Frankenstein accused the President of having bolts in his neck.
The “case of Professor Gates and Officer Crowley” refers, of course, to the July 2009 incident in which Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested by a Cambridge police officer while trying to force open the front door of his house. Obama called the incident “stupid,” proving either that he unthinkingly favors blacks over whites or that he unthinkingly sympathizes with people who are arrested trying to break into their own homes. King, who does not give a rat’s ass what you think about him or is a savvy manipulator of his constituency or some combination of the two, has not retreated from his remarks.
“I have no regrets about what I said,” King told Radio Iowa on Tuesday. “I stand by what I said, because what I said is accurate. It’s factual….I don’t want anybody to think that Steve King loses a minute’s sleep over this.” Unfortunately, Steve King has lost several minutes of speaking time over this, particularly in Colorado, where Republican House candidate Cory Gardner and a local Tea Party rally both cancelled his appearances. Yet King remains undaunted, saying:
I don’t want to put it away in the first day because I think the American people need to have this debate about what appears to me to be an inclination on the part of the White House and the Justice Department and perhaps others within the administration to break on the side of favoritism with regard to race.
The American people also need to have a debate about our growing dependence on subordinate clauses, but that’s for another time. As the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart points out, King’s statements are not backed by a lot of evidence. Despite his assurance that what he said was both accurate and factual, he hasn’t offered any examples of Obama’s racial bias, besides the aforementioned Gates incident. His indication that such racism is primarily located in “the White House and the Justice Department” seems to refer to the two highest-profile black men in Washington: the President and Attorney General Eric Holder. “Perhaps others within the administration” obviously means Joe Biden, just as soon as King can figure out if his grandma was a mulatto or what.
Here is a tip for white people reading Combat! blog: don’t talk about how other, non-white people are racist. Even if you are in Rwanda, and you are at a Hutu bar where a local Hutu representative is talking about how Tutsis have created a thug culture in Rwandan popular music, you should just try to shift the conversation to economic policy or something. Steve King is not going to convince anybody that Barack Obama is a racist. Even if he were, through his crusade of run-on sentences, to uncover a vast, anti-white conspiracy that touched every level of government, he would still be remembered as the racist dude from Iowa who exposed several other, less malevolent racist dudes in the White House.
No one needs to have this explained to them, except apparently an elected member of our legislative branch needs to have this explained to him, so here goes: there are many more white people in America than black people. The President’s plan to elevate blacks above whites in the United States—which starts with yelling at a cop in Massachusetts and progresses to some kind of one-world government—would run into considerable opposition among, for example, the 493 US Representatives and Senators who are not black.
Presumably, Steve King knows this. He speaks to an overwhelmingly white audience, certainly at home and on the G. Gordon Liddy show and also when he’s addressing Congress. We are left with three interpretations. One, King does not actually believe that the President of the United States is implementing racist policies in order to elevate blacks at the expense of whites, and he’s only saying it to get votes. Two, King does believe that the President is racist, and he’s calling upon the power of white Congress in white America to stop him before anything changes. Three, King hasn’t thought about any of this at all, and when he goes on the radio the things he says have as much meaning as the noises of a parrot that has been trained to say “small business owners” over and over. None of these scenarios is particularly promising, but I guess we have to work with the Representatives we have.
Fans of C-SPAN will know Steve King as the guy who regularly teams up with Michele Bachmann to give long, rambling speeches with copious (and poorly designed) visual aids to an otherwise empty chamber while the House is not in session. The best part of these speeches is not the fact that they is apparently making them for the sole benefit of the C-SPAN cameras and the 20-30 viewers at home, but the collegial, professional, and high-minded way that Bachmann and King conduct their dialogues, like two children attending an imaginary tea party and trying to sound like adults.
Ahem… my highly embarrassing typo above should read
“… not the fact that they ARE apparently …”