Wingnut Watch: The Rightwing Ravings of Iowa Rep. Steve King

The Far Right of the Republican Party has never been much good at thoughtfulness and self-reflection. That explains their consistent but misguided (and factually challenged) effort to paint Barack Obama as a Godless heathen, a secret socialist, and—wait for it!—a Muslim terrorist.

But anybody who's been reading the papers or watching TV in the last two months has noticed that Obama and his transition team have proven to be remarkably reasonable and sensible. His atheist, Marxist, terrorist tendencies seem to be, well, missing.

But thanks to U.S. Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican, we can still find unreconstructed wingnuts, impervious to facts and unwilling to acknowledge the possibility that any of their cherished beliefs could be wrong.

Which results in this report from Iowa:

U.S. Rep. Steve King, a Kiron Republican known for his warning that the election of Barack Obama would lead to terrorists "dancing in the streets," declined to participate [in the Obama inauguration], according to congressional aides.

King said in an interview that he would have had to use money from his campaign fund to pay for the cookies and coffee to be offered up at the reception and he didn’t think it was an appropriate use for the money. “It’s not anti-anybody,” he said. “My disagreements with Barack Obama have never been anything but philosophical.”

Rep. King is the same man who made these oh-so-accurate observations (ha!) about Obama last year (hat tip to ThinkProgress):

King, known for provocative, partisan remarks, suggested Obama actually could be classified as even more extreme than a socialist. King also said his party is the only one with a legitimate claim on representing freedom as Americans know it.

“When you take a lurch to the left you end up in a totalitarian dictatorship,” King said. “There is no freedom to the left. It’s always to our side of the aisle.”

Or how about these King pearls of political wisdom:

Obama was not raised with an intentional attitude toward Americanism. … The way to look at the reasons Obama doesn’t place his hand over his heart when the National Anthem is playing, or wear an American flag pin is primarily because he is not willful or spiteful, but because it just doesn’t occur to him because it’s not the way he’s been raised. American patriotism is not imprinted on his mind or in his heart, because he wasn’t raised as an American.