There really is no way to put my own contempt for Iowa Rep. Steve King into words. He's spent his entire career in one long dogwhistle for the racist elements of the base. He's either among the dumbest people imaginable or a sociopathic liar. He probably constantly smells of ham and bitterness. So when Steve King, actual elected person, goes on Twitter to share a picture of the president of the United States wearing a turban, and when Steve King, actual person responsible for things like laws and wars, posits that Obama's
"Crusader" speech is now a much bigger Jihadi recruiting tool than Gitmo, there's really nowhere to even go with that.
We could pretend to be surprised by Rep. Steve King, but of course we're not. We could continue to marvel at the oversized power Rep. Steve King, by virtue of being the loudest xenophobe in the House, holds over the entire rest of his caucus—but given that all of Republican strategy consists of the struggle to pander to racists and xenophobes while maintaining plausible deniability amongst normal people, it only stands to reason that the members willing to cross back and forth over that line the most (Steve King on immigrants 'n foreigners; new House Majority Whip Steve Scalise on being "David Duke without the baggage") get put in charge of how to do it.
So instead we'll just raise our eyebrows to observe:
— There are apparently people in this country still under the impression that Obama is a Muslim, or at least Muslim-ish, or at least a foreigner. Some of them draw political cartoons. Some are in charge of our laws. Many of them still conflate being Muslim with wearing a turban, a common mistake that continues to be responsible for dumb hate crimes by stupid people, but stupid people are of course our nation's slowest learners. We should pity them.
— Rep. Steve King appears to be under the impression that the world's Muslim population had never heard of the Crusades before Obama brought them up.
— Now that Obama mentioned them, Rep. Steve King apparently believes that Obama outrageously mentioning the Crusades and other awkward moments in Christian history is going to drive pseudo-religious radicalization overseas more than "Gitmo", i.e. more than our revealed national actions and ongoing defense of torture, rendition and indefinite detention.
I came in this week to an inbox containing, among other things, an angry assertion by a far-right think tank that the Crusades were perfectly justified because the Muslims were Bad, and therefore Obama is Bad. I should have known that defending the purity of the Crusades would quickly become A Thing, because there is no way that Obama can mention anything without conservatives rising up to take the opposing side on that Thing. Our politics is a farce, we are governed by outright morons, and it is impossible to satirize any of it.