Joni Ernst
Oh, Iowa. You already have Steve King. Why would you want to inflict
this on the entire state?
[Republican Senate candidate Joni] Ernst has alleged that the federal government is partnering with the United Nations to force Iowans off their land and into urban cores as part of a conspiracy called Agenda 21. At a campaign event last November, she said:
All of us agreed that Agenda 21 is a horrible idea. One of those implications to Americans, again, going back to what did it does do to the individual family here in the state of Iowa, and what I've seen, the implications that it has here is moving people off of their agricultural land and consolidating them into city centers, and then telling them that you don't have property rights anymore. These are all things that the UN is behind, and it's bad for the United States and bad for families here in the state of Iowa.
That's just a small taste. She's
said that Obama has "become a dictator." She's
said that a federal minimum wage is "ridiculous." She
believes that states have the power to nullify federal law, and that the U.S. really did find
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
But when called on her tea party fever dreams, she backtracks:
When asked by Yahoo News last month about her suggestion that an international cabal would relocate her constituents to Des Moines, Ernst said, "I don't think that the UN Agenda 21 is a threat to Iowa farmers." When asked about impeachment in July, she insisted, "I have not seen any evidence that the president should be impeached." She added that "obviously" the president is not a dictator. In June, referring to the federal minimum wage, she said that, contra whatever she said earlier that month, "I never called for the abolishment of it. Never." In May, she walked back her weapons of mass destruction claim and conceded that Iraq had none at the time of the US invasion. Recently, Ernst attacked Braley for proposing an adjustment to the Social Security retirement age, while simultaneously making an identical proposal herself.
All of which suggests that when Ernst says that crazy shit, she knows she's saying crazy shit and is reserving it just for hardcore tea party audiences. And for
her creators, the Kochs, of course. That basically makes her a more cynical version of Steve King, because he apparently truly believes all this crap.
