In contemporary American politics meanness is all too often mistaken for conviction.
How else does one explain Congressman Steve King and the Elmer Gantry-like sway he holds over the western Iowa electorate. He couldn’t make it a day in a history class but we elect King to Congress almost as a test to democracy itself or perhaps as a practical joke on the rest of the nation.
Just as “Saturday Night Live” lost its punch this isn’t funny anymore.
Since winning a GOP special convention battle in Denison in 2002 King has made so many bizarre statements that the Iowa Optometric Association should cut him a check for all the eye-rolling damage he’s caused with his commentary.
Generally, though, King keeps at least a loose grip on the rope when he jumps into the sea of insanity. When he calls for a fence to be built on the border with Mexico or analogizes prison abuse in Iraq to frat-row hazing or compares supporters of certain stem-cell research with Nazis or runs around taking photos of war protesters or brings up unicorns when talking about lesbians (can we use the Patriot Act to see what movies King’s been watching lately?) there’s usually at least something he can hang his hat on, some way to defend the statement.
How else are we going to keep the illegals out? The terrorists behead people so what’s the big problem with making them play jailhouse Twister naked? Women shouldn’t be married to other chicks in the first place so granting them a divorce is like writing fiction rich with unicorns.
He always seems to take a ladder with him into the hole.
But not this time, not with what he said last week about former Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the virtually universally discredited ideological scalp hunter and a man most of us thought went down in infamy right along with communism.
Joseph McCarthy is the political leader who cried wolf in the 1950s and nearly cost us the Cold War. He’s the inspiration for much of the movie “The Manchurian Candidate” for heaven’s sake.
Most of us see footage of the McCarthy hearings or remember the era and shudder at the thought of what the censured senator represented.
Not King. He sees a role model, a political jukebox hero.
The other day there was King on the U.S. House of Representatives floor in a proud moment for Iowa. Was he fighting for farm subsidies, bringing in money for the four-laning of U.S. Highway 30 or delivering the first good news in 20 years to the town of Arion?
No, King was making a case against the naming of a post office in Berkeley, Calif., after a 94-year-old former city councilwoman, an Alzheimer’s victim King believes is a communist threat because she thought it would be OK if people read Karl Marx.
When another member of Congress, Barbara Lee, said King’s tactics and comments raised the specter of McCarthyism, our bright bulb embraced the comparison. One would have thought Lee had suggested slipping King’s smug mug onto Mount Rushmore right next to old Abe.
“If Barbara Lee would read the history of Joe McCarthy, she would realize that he was a hero for America,” King remarked, according to several California newspapers and the Associated Press.
At Northwest Missouri State University the administration must backfill its history requirements in students’ senior years. King never stuck around that long. He pulled a high number in the Vietnam draft lottery, waived a quick good-bye to Maryville and apparently any fancy book reading or classes involving discussion of McCarthy.
It’s often said that smart men know what they don’t know. King doesn’t even get that far.
“It’s extraordinarily bad judgment or he’s historically illiterate,” Art Neu, a Carroll attorney and former Republican lieutenant governor, said of King’s 50-year retroactive McCarthy endorsement.
This past week, I checked out a few books on McCarthy, read portions of them, and went over some other political biographies on major American figures in which McCarthy factored. I don’t like to see our congressman’s words dangling out there defenseless.
Surely, there has to be something redeeming about McCarthy. Perhaps he took steps to improve the cheese up there in his Wisconsin.
Well, there wasn’t an ounce of decency, the simple words that brought him down, in McCarthy.
Besides being the closest thing to a despot anyone can aspire to in a democracy, a ruthless ruiner of reputations of men, many of them decorated military, McCarthy was just an all-around bully of surpassing surliness.
A spirits drinker of prodigious proportions, McCarthy reportedly asked staff members to get phone numbers for him when attractive women testified at committee hearings.
All of this being said, maybe we’re missing something here, those of us stunned by King’s comments on McCarthy.
And since King never got around to some of those classes at Northwest Missouri State, and because he appears to be a little light in the history department, we as his constituents may want to collectively assign him some make-up work, say an essay explaining why Joseph McCarthy is a “hero for America.”
If he doesn’t apologize for the remark and backpedal away from this like Lance Armstrong going down a mountain backwards, and we still re-elect King, then it is us, the voters of western Iowa, who should have to answer Joseph Welch’s famous question to McCarthy: “Have you left no sense of decency?”
