Needs a break from talking for a while.
At this point I don't even care what Steve King says, I just want him to stop saying it for a day or two to give all of the rest of us a break. Take a vacation, become bedridden, get your head stuck in the office recycling bin—don't care, Steve, just stop saying
things for a bit and give us some time to catch up. (Just kidding on that last one, I don't doubt for a minute that Steve King has ordered all his office recycling bins to be cast into Mount Doom, and has tasked the smallest and most fragile of his interns to doing exactly that.)
Apparently, though, we have to do this thing. Steve King is still defending his statement … sigh… about the melon-calved brown people, apparently because this is the singular most important thing Steve King has ever thought of in his life and he is going to make damn sure every last person in America has heard it several times and has had ample opportunity to ponder why it is that no matter how many efforts the Republican Party launches to prove that they are not, in fact, the party of fever dreams and your grandfather's racist buddy's favorite sayings, someone like Steve King always quickly comes upon the scene to eff all of that up and reinvigorate the latest trends in batshit insanity. So Steve King says to America, he says: Shut up, America. I was only talking about the melon-calved drug dealers, I wasn't talking about all the other immigrants. You Americans are dumb and do not understand my language and stuff.
“My statement was very narrowly defined, not even just to drug smugglers, but professional drug smugglers that are in physical shape to carry 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert,” King said. “That’s what I described. It’s amazing to me that anyone can interpret anything in there that has to do with race or ethnicity.”
Which is an intriguing window in how Steve King's "mind" "works", because it seems King is convinced that the problem everyone had with his statement was that they were offended by the melon-calved characterization of modern day professional drug smugglers, and not all the various other parts of it that asserted that pretty much all immigrants
were drug smugglers, or at least the professional drug smugglers outnumbered the bright kids who do well in schools by a factor of 100 to 1:
”For everyone who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there that weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”
It would be the assertion that, among undocumented immigrants of a specific ethnicity, the valedictorian-to-drug-mule ratio is of course such-and-such that would be the offensive part of the statement. The
melons bit was just all of us laughing at and pointing at the man. Apparently King was mortally wounded by the part where we all laughed at him for his portrayal of superhuman Popeye-legged waifs each carrying a bag of Mary Jane the size of a small cow across the desert, but the part about him presuming the entire immigrant population to be one of drug-dealing neer do wells has not, even after all this time, even entered his mind as being something people would get bent out of shape about.
I hesitate to say this, but I am not sure Steve King understands the language. Clearly, the statement "for everyone who is a valedictorian" is not "narrowly defined" to "professional drug smugglers", since valedictorians and professional drug smugglers are quite often two different things. Worse, he doesn't seem to be any closer to figuring these things out as time goes on. He knows people are making fun of him for the cantaloupe thing, though, and that seems to be the only part of the coverage that has penetrated that thick, melon-like skull of his.