A True American

Ah, Steve King. The pride of Iowa. Lover of rape babies, hater of puppies. How we haven't missed you one tiny little bit. And yet here you are, catching that nasty case of Trump that's going around. King hit the pause button, with his greasy butter cow fingers, on his usual tirade against cantaloupe-shaped Mexicans and their drug mule children, to dry-hump another of his favorite topics: those damned Muslims, all up in his Christian-nation America.

"Sharia law is incompatible with the United States Constitution and so if they want to demonstrate that they are open to being Americanized, the first thing they should do is renounce Sharia law," King told TPM. "You won't get Keith Ellison or Andre Carson in this Congress to renounce Sharia law, let alone somebody that's just come out of the Middle East that is someone who has been steeped in Islam for a lifetime."

Conservatives have been trying to force Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison to renounce his own faith and prove he isn't a terrorist ("no offense") who hates America since, oh, about the second he was sworn into office in 2007, back when the Iraq War had been won, the mission accomplished, the terrorist threat shocked and awed into its last desperate throes.

And then the next year there were TWO of them -- that makes it a conspiracy! -- when Indiana Rep. André D. Carson was special electioned into Congress, and both of those Muslims have consistently refused to stop being Muslims. Can't you just feel the sharia creeping right up your skirt? As King so wisely observes, if you can't even get Muslim members of Congress to recognize the unconstitutionality of their faith, then all Muslims are terrorists. Or something.

Which is why, while he doesn't exactly agree with Donald Trump's proposal to bar all Muslims from entering America, including the ones who are American citizens, he doesn't exactly not completely agree with it either. He thinks it's at least worth discussing. It's the reasonable thing to do, in a country where he knows there is no discrimination against Muslims, just legitimate national security concerns:

The president can dredge up his Crusader history and try to leverage that back against us to guilt us, but what’s this discrimination that’s going on against Muslims in this country? I’m not seeing it. I mean, they’re beheading Christians on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, and some people are speaking ill of that component. So where are the moderate Muslims speaking up?

King's raised the bar, though, since that adorable declaration in May, so now it's not enough for Muslims to condemn terrorism; they must condemn Islam itself because where in the Bill of Rights does Jesus says Muslims are OK?

Thanks as always for chiming in, Rep. King. Now you may go back to telling Mexican-American college graduates they're "very good at English, you know what I’m saying." Yeah, Steve, we know.

[TPM]