Rep. Steve King, Iowa

Representative Steve King of Iowa insists on being an embarrassment to his state. In a bid to continue stirring up racism against President Barack Obama, King went all Birther during a tele-townhall meeting last week. When asked if Obama was born in the United States, King decided not to take the high road and say that he was. Instead, he gave this weird response about how his parents may have announced Obama’s birth via telegram from Kenya.

Perhaps they used carrier pigeons instead.

King states:

We went down into the Library of Congress and we found a microfiche there of two newspapers in Hawaii each of which had published the birth of Barack Obama. It would have been awfully hard to fraudulently file the birth notice of Barack Obama being born in Hawaii and get that into our public libraries and that microfiche they keep of all the newspapers published. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some other explanations on how they might’ve announced that by telegram from Kenya. The list goes on. But drilling into that now, even if we could get a definitive answer and even if it turned out that Barack Obama was conclusively not born in America, I don’t think we could get that case sold between now and November.

Apparently people will not be happy unless they can go back in time and actually watch Obama being born in the hospital. However, this is not all that King is busy doing. Apparently, he would like to allow dogs and chickens to be put into rings in order to allow them to rip each other to shreds for the entertainment of people. King told someone about his recent legislation that would undermine local standards preventing animal cruelty and torture.

At the same tele-townhall where he went Birther he stated “‘It’s wrong to rate animals above human beings. . .’ To make his point, King argued that ‘there’s something wrong’ for society to make it a ‘federal crime to watch animals fight’ but ‘it’s not a federal crime to induce somebody to watch people fighting.’”

He said:

When the legislation that passed in the farm bill that says that it’s a federal crime to watch animals fight or to induce someone else to watch an animal fight but it’s not a federal crime to induce somebody to watch people fighting, there’s something wrong with the priorities of people that think like that.

ThinkProgress notes that:

Of course, there is a very good reason we ban dogfighting and other similar forms of cruelty: animals don’t have a choice in the matter. Manny Pacquiao chooses to step into the ring. Michael Vick’s dogs did not. Similarly, when a human boxer loses a fight, he is not ritually executed after the fight. The same is not always true in dogfighting.

Unfortunately, King is a longtime advocate for legalizing dogfighting, cockfighting, and other forms of animal torture. Most recently, he fought legislation that would make it illegal to bring a child to an animal fight. He has also set aside his love for states’ rights in order to forbid localities from enacting anti-animal torture standards.

King goes completely off the rails when he tries to explain his position saying how animals have more rights than fetuses and suggesting “that liberals have so devalued life, that 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.’” Since that is illegal, King should try it and see just how fast he gets arrested and locked up in jail.

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/07/31/615951/steve-king-dogfighting/

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/08/01/619371/steve-king-birther/