We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies

[grumbler]

We can restore western civilization with a lot of dead brown babies.

Not if my basement is in any way representative.  Running out of room, and no restoration yet.

[CountDeMoney]

Ed has a sign in his front yard that says "Dead Fetus Storage."  Because storing dead fetuses is his fucking business.

[Ed Anger]

One more and I'm an ace.

[CountDeMoney]

DONT FLUSH

[CountDeMoney]

The fuck is up with that avatar?  Christmas for Crackers, starring Bobby Lee?

[Ed Anger]

The fuck is up with that avatar?  Christmas for Crackers, starring Bobby Lee?

[CountDeMoney]

Challenge accepted, suh.

[Ed Anger]

 

Mew.

[Syt]

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/why-steve-king-keeps-winning-214913

Why Steve King Keeps Winning

In the controversial congressman's district, bluntness resonates.

While most of the country was freaking out about Steve King's recent comments about America's demographic destiny—"racist old white man," "disgusting human being," "you need to resign" were just a few of the comments on Twitter—Iowans were a bit less surprised. Count the state's governor among them.

"Steve King is Steve King," Terry Branstad, a fellow Republican, said of the U.S. congressman's latest explosive rant.

On Sunday, King, who represents the state's northwest corner, had tweeted in defense of the Dutch anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim politician Geert Wilders: "Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies." When observers pointed out that the sentiment mirrored the infamous 14-word credo of white supremacists—"We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children"—King didn't back down. Asked about the tweet on CNN, the congressman declared that he had "meant exactly what I said" and added, "If you go down the road a few generations, or maybe centuries, with the inter-marriage, I'd like to see an America that is just so homogenous that we look a lot the same." At the end of the interview, he recommended that viewers read The Camp of the Saints, a French novel about immigration that is widely considered xenophobic, if not openly racist. Not long afterward, in another interview, King predicted that "Hispanics and the blacks will be fighting each other" before the country becomes majority-minority. In the midst of it all, the white supremacist website the Daily Stormer embraced King as a "hero."

It was far from the first time that Iowa's most controversial politician had provoked outrage. On the possibility of a President Barack Hussein Obama in 2008, he said, "The Al Qaeda, and the radical Islamists and their supporters, will be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11." On the Supreme Court's ruling in favor of same-sex marriage in 2015: "Their ruling really says anybody can marry anybody. ... You could marry your lawnmower." King had also tried to block abolitionist heroine Harriet Tubman from becoming the new face of the $20 bill, and displayed the Confederate flag on his desk in Washington—never mind that Iowa fought with the Union during the Civil War.

And yet, King keeps winning—and by large margins. He has served Congress for 14 years, making him the state's most senior member in the House, and served in state politics for six years before that. His position has made him a—forgive the cliché—kingmaker not just in Iowa politics, but also nationally, given our state's place in the presidential election process. In 2015, nearly a dozen Republican hopefuls trudged up to Des Moines for King's year-old "Iowa Freedom Summit" in a testament to his growing political clout.

All of which helps explain why Chelsea Clinton, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and CNN commentator Ana Navarro were enraged by King's latest comments, labeling them racist, but his fellow Republicans are generally loath to criticize him too harshly. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, GOP House Whip Steve Scalise and former presidential candidate Jeb Bush all spoke out against King's remarks without using "racist" in their initial condemnations. Neither did most every prominent Iowa Republican leader—Governor Branstad, U.S. Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst, State Republican Party Chair Jeff Kaufmann and others—even as they artfully tried to distance themselves from the comments.

How does King seemingly survive every flare-up?

It helps to understand the district he represents—Iowa's 4th—which covers much of the western half of the state and stretches across the northern third, as well. While the area includes mid-size cities like Ames, Fort Dodge, Mason City and Sioux City (with populations between 25,000-85,000), most of it is made up of rural areas and far smaller cities where the census bureau counts in the hundreds, not thousands. They are towns like Cleghorn, Mallard and Lytton that no one outside the state has ever heard of—unless they are professional political operatives.

Geographically, the district encompasses 39 of Iowa's 99 counties, making it the largest of the state's four congressional districts. (Iowa used to have five districts but lost one over the past decade as the stagnant population failed to keep up with growth in other parts of the country.) King, who founded a construction company before entering politics, lives in the heart of this Republican bastion, in rural Kiron, a town struggling to reach a population of 300.

Locals here in the Hawkeye State are generally proud to think of their neighbors as "Iowa nice." But another word—besides the four-lettered kind his critics often use—comes to mind for those who have watched King, 67, for years: blunt. It's a descriptor they use almost with a sense of endearment.

"He's blunt and says what he thinks," says Gwen Ecklund, who earlier this year concluded eight years as the Republican chair of Crawford County, in western Iowa. King grew up in the area, and Ecklund has followed and supported his political career for decades. As she explains it, that brusqueness turns some people off—while others love it. "I think it is the same phenomenon as Donald Trump," she figures.

"He's very charismatic," says her husband, Arlan, who sat nearby in the couple's home in Denison. "He's a gifted orator. He can easily speak for 45 minutes without notes."

But there is more to King's tells-it-like-it-is appeal. Northwestern Iowa is changing. Financially, the farm community has struggled over the past few years with commodity prices for corn and beans often falling below the cost of production. That's helping to shrink the rural population, especially among younger people, who are increasingly looking to bigger cities like Des Moines and Cedar Rapids for better job opportunities. According to the U.S. Census, King's home county of Crawford now has a population of about 17,000 people—about 4,000 fewer than it had in 1900.

The area had been nearly all white for generations, but that, too, has been slowly changing as more Hispanic immigrants have arrived. In 2000, the county was about 93 percent white. That's now dropped to 82 percent, with Hispanics accounting for nearly all of the change. Eager to make a living for themselves, many newcomers have been willing to take lower-paying jobs in agriculture, manufacturing and meat-packing. And not everyone is comfortable with the changing look of schools, grocery stores and churches in town.

"There are some 'Steve Kings' out there," says immigration attorney Jason Finch, who practices in Denison and nearby Storm Lake, two communities with rising immigrant populations. And he doesn't mean it as a compliment. "I had a county attorney tell me it was his life's mission to deport as many immigrants as he could."

Still, Finch reckons that anti-immigrant sentiment is held by a shrinking majority in the region, and where it exists, he says, it tends to be rooted more in ignorance than racism. "The younger generation handles it a lot better than the older generation does," Finch says.

Politically, much of King's district is deeply conservative, with registered Republicans (nearly 200,000 of them) easily outnumbering registered Democrats (fewer than 125,000). That makes it hard for challengers to take on King, no matter how many controversial assertions he makes.

In 2012, King was tested by a genuinely tough reelection fight. His opponent was Christie Vilsack, the spouse of a popular former Democratic governor, Tom Vilsack, who would later become U.S. secretary of agriculture. King's district had been redrawn, and was less Republican as a result. But King ended up getting a boost from Branstad, who had grown concerned with the dynamics of the race and personally sent staff to help the campaign. King won by 8 points.

The next year, as Congress debated comprehensive immigration reform, King took a stand as one of the most conservative—and controversial—voices speaking out against illegal immigration. "For every one who's a valedictorian," he told Newsmax, referring to young undocumented immigrants crossing the border, "there's another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds. And they've got calves the size of cantaloupes because they've been hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert." Iowa Republicans cringed at the words, but no prominent leader strongly denounced King at the time.

His margin of victory on election night in 2014? It was 23 points—far higher than his margin against Vilsack two years before, but just about par for the course for King. In fact, King has long crushed his competition. With the exception of 2012, he has won by at least 21 percentage points in each of his reelection bids; in 2010, the margin was 34 points.

Nick Ryan understands why. Last year, Ryan, one of the state's most well-known Republican operatives and donors, helped to orchestrate the first primary challenge King has faced since winning his seat in 2002. Ryan's chosen candidate, State Senator Rick Bertrand, lost by 30 percentage points.

"He's an ideologue," Ryan says of King. According to Ryan, the true believers in Iowa cheer King when he says what they want to hear about abortion, same-sex marriage, immigration, the constitution and those dreaded liberals—even if the congressman is more likely to deliver his message on cable TV shows than talking with local Iowans, and even if King himself admits he has not authored a single piece of legislation that has become law. (Neither King nor his congressional office responded to requests for comment for this article.)

Ryan believes comments like King's latest—which have been criticized more vehemently than in past—make the congressman politically vulnerable, and he is searching for another primary candidate for 2018.

"His rhetoric has gotten more coarse," Ryan says. "And more weird."

Still, if the past two decades in Iowa politics prove anything, it's that King can survive controversy. He's already fundraising off the backlash against him, declaring, "I refuse to stand down." And most longtime Iowa political hands think King is pretty much invulnerable.

"No one will ever get close to him in a general election. It's too heavily Republican," says Chris Rants, the state's former speaker of the house who represented the northwest corner of Iowa for 18 years. "You don't draw crossover voters. You don't generally get many moderates in a primary. His comments aren't going to change anything."

They sure won't, William Jahn told me. Jahn watches all the fuss over King on TV from his front porch. His rural Coon Rapids house sits about 100 yards just outside King's district boundary lines in Guthrie County. He sympathizes with King's idea about a culture in decline—and doesn't think that's racist.

"There isn't a racist bone in King's body," he says. "We are a nation based on Western values. I think Steve King is courageous to do it. Some cultures are better than others."

That kind of talk makes the Ecklunds back in Crawford County a little squeamish.

"He says things that have some merit, but he can go too far," Arlan Ecklund tells me. "Sometimes he goes off the deep end and needs to know when to stop talking."

"But he says what he thinks. That's part of his magnetism," he adds.

What about those who claim King's thinking is white nationalism?

"I don't think so," Arlan reflects. "Our son-in-law is a native of the Dominican Republic. He became a citizen about three years ago. Congressman King spoke at his ceremony. I think he just believes things need to be done in the right way."

Gwen Ecklund agrees. Racist? No. Passionate conservative? No doubt. "The reality is no matter what he says, someone will have a problem with it," she says.

But if the pattern holds, no matter what he says, her controversial congressman will also likely remain King of the land.

[Ed Anger]

Sounds delightful.