Rep. Steve King on Cantaloupe Calves and Hog Harvesting:
Republican Steve King looks like every white person's beleaguered uncle who comes home from his job selling washing machines at the local Sears, pissed off at everyone who couldn't get their credit approved for the purchase he spent time arranging, turns on Fox "news," drinks some cheap whiskey, and yells at the TV about how these spics and niggers are ruining the nation, even as he tries to cajole those very people into buying shit they don't need so he can get the commission. Truly, he is like some 1970s stereotype, the Silent Majority or whatever, the Last White Prick Standing.

Instead, of course, he's the congressman from northwest Iowa, a state that, like many others in the heartland, is dependent upon the cruel exploitation of tens of thousands of undocumented immigrant workers to keep the fields planted and harvested and to keep the meatpacking plants grinding up animal carcasses. King's district is new (he used to represent the 5th - now it's the 4th), since Iowa lost a seat in the House of Representatives in the last census. But King's district is also 96% white, and, hey, a motherfuckin' representative's got to represent.

So it was that, in an interview with nutzoid right-wing "news" webtoilet Newsmax, King argued against the DREAM Act and other legislation that would create a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants by citing the leg size of some of them: "Some of them are valedictorians — and their parents brought them in. It wasn't their fault. It's true in some cases, but they aren't all valedictorians. They weren't all brought in by their parents. For everyone 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. Those people would be legalized with the same act." The Rude Pundit hasn't spent as much time as he perhaps should contemplating the sexy, brown, rounded leg muscles of teenage Latinos. Rep. Steve King apparently has.

If you read the entire interview, King is actually fairly incoherent in how he describes the exploited immigrant work force and the debate over giving them a chance to live here without fear of deportation: "We do have people who are in Iowa who are advocating for some type of immigration reform..What they, of course, mean is amnesty — and then they tell me that I need someone to gather my eggs or I need someone to harvest the hogs. I need somebody to milk my cows. Those are arguments that get way ahead of themselves, but there are many, many businesses in the state and in the country that are for immigration because of the anticipation of having cheap, illegal labor ready to take those jobs. I remind them that if we become independent of illegal labor, we may fall back to a place where we're no longer depending upon illegal labor."

Seriously, if you can figure out what the fuck he's talking about, you must have a PhD in the language of fucktard. It seems like he's trying to thread some needle between admitting that the economy of his state would collapse without that "illegal labor" and standing firm against any bill that helps them because law and order or some such shit. Defending himself against condemnation by fellow Republicans, King told Breitbart "news" (motto: "Keeping Andrew's mouldering corpse propped up as long as we can"), "I don’t yet know of anyone who has raised a logical argument against my statement."

Which might be possible if there was anything logical about his statement. It's a bit of an unfair comparison because, you know, there's only one valedictorian per graduating class. Indeed, you could say that for every undocumented kid who is a valedictorian, there's another 100 slaving away in the meatpacking factories of Iowa, making less than 10 bucks a day harvesting hogs. They might be "legalized," too.

Or is that not logical?

(True story: the Rude Pundit was approached by someone to get paid to run Newsmax's feed on this here blog. His response email: "Thanks for the offer, but I'll decline. Newsmax is run by awful human beings who print lies.")