why are the righties SUDDENLY calling out racist Steve King's blatant racism???

**reagansghost** · 01-16-2019, 12:32 PM

Now that Iowa congressman Steve King has finally gone over the brink and defended “white nationalism” and “white supremacy,” Republicans from his own state and nationally are piously denouncing the shitbag, having suddenly discovered that he’s a mite racist-y.

King’s probably justified in feeling betrayed by his old friends, particularly those in Iowa who know him well. Maybe he got a bit carried away in forgetting to use code words for “white,” but he’s been renowned during his entire congressional career for being an old-school nativist who isn’t just concerned about “illegal immigration,” but wants restricted immigration generally — at least from nonwhite countries — as a matter of cultural (and by close implication racial) self-defense. That what always distinguished King and his congressional doppelgänger from Colorado, Tom Tancredo (who left the House in 2009 after a long-shot nativist campaign for president). Maybe they talked about the “rule of law” like other opponents of immigration reform, but they were always clear that they considered all non-European immigration as a threat. Indeed, until Donald Trump came on the national political scene, King was for a while all but alone in the fever swamps on this issue.

So no one paying attention should have had any illusions about King’s signature views on his signature subject, or his zest for being outrageous. Back in 2013, Sahil Kapur hit some of the lowlights:

Since King came to Congress, his most over-the-top rhetorical outbursts include comparing immigrants to dogs, calling illegal immigration a “slow-motion terrorist attack” on the United States, claiming Al Qaeda would be “dancing in the streets” if Barack Obama was elected president, and declaring that racial profiling wasn’t an issue in Ferguson, Mo., because protesters were from a single “continental origin.”

That was all aside from King’s famous 2013 “canteloupes” remark about Dreamers, excoriated even by Republicans, as the New York Times reported at the time:

In July he made the ridiculous, now notorious claim that for every child of illegal immigrants “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.”

House Speaker John Boehner reprimanded Mr. King, calling his comments “deeply offensive and wrong.”

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/...publicans.html