If the eyes are the window to the soul, then this man needs caulk.
Steve King. . . aren't there several of them? There's a Colorado politician as well as the man Stephen Colbert called a "corn packer." For a democratically elected Congress, there sure seem to be people named "king" there. Anyway, Corn Packer King has a history of rhapsodic explanations for his positions.
Quite a few Republicans, when asked why they wish to cut food aid to children, will, instead of answering directly, misdirect the questioner and start talking about national budgets, deficits, credit ratings, comparing a national government to a household, comparing this nation to Greece or Spain, or simply speaking in a grandly vacuous manner about virtues -- responsibility, working, honesty. (Listen to Stephen Fincher of Tennessee, who has averaged $267,692 a year in Ag. subsidies, say that SNAP should not get funded because, "Those who do not work shall not eat" and that the money for it is "stolen in Washington." You can read about it at ThinkProgress from May 21, 2013.)
Ask a Republican representative why she is against reducing overcrowding in prisons, and, instead of a direct answer, you will hear about how the bad must pay for crimes, how coddling criminals is bad. And, of course, ask why a representative opposes even the niggardly and Byzantine Senate immigration reform bill, and you will hear about "law breakers" and "criminals" who should not get "amnesty" for their "crimes."
What makes Steve King so much fun for journalists is that he, like Michelle Bachmann, does not simply fail to answer or insult those who feel differently from him, but that his misdirections are poorly organized tales of madness and fantasy. A few days ago, for example, King explained that the President was "lowering America's values" by doing things "not related to his core job." These things were "getting involved in" SB 1070 in Arizona (and since that was a case of a state claiming the right to designate and patrol and set law for the borders of the U.S., it seems a mite federal to me), congratulating a gay athlete, and "things" that he takes sides on, like racial issues.
Now, you and I are already degraded. We expect the GOP politicians to lie about their reasons in the first place. We shouldn't. We accept it. We shouldn't. We write about their tales only when they are as exotically nuts, as lavishly splattered with nonsense and ignorance as Steve King's discussion of opposing the Senate Immigration Reform bill because, as Jad Lewison reported the comments already here, "For every valedictorian" DREAMer, "there are a hundred out there that they weigh 130 pounds, and they've got calves the size of cantaloupes because they're hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert."
Follow below, and I will show you how King's fantasy novel setting requires no study, no statistics, and not much intelligence to know that it is an overflowing basket of meadow muffins, a full casino of cow chips.
I am attempting to write this diary without links so that the form will echo the theme: there just isn't much need for a lot of erudition to know how Steve King, instead of acting like the character Martini in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and saying "hit me" with 24 showing at black jack over and over again, should have said, "Well, I'm just for taking this slowly and having a reasonable discussion, after we go back to the drawing board and reach consensus on the components." (It would have been a great greasy lie, but it's what the cool kids say when they want to fool their teachers/constituents. Remember that that was the universal coverage GOP electors spoke when the ACA was ready for a vote?)
I would be surprised, but I wish it would occur, if a Republican answered truthfully. "I voted to cut off food stamps because people on food stamps already hate me, and I really don't care," one might say, "and, honestly, if that person has to work so many hours to get baby formula that she can't vote, that's a win for me." If one said, "I'm voting against immigration reform because my donors think Spanish speaking people are less than human," I'd be surprised in a good way (that they told the truth, not that this is their truth). I suspect we have our Christine O'Donnells, our Michelle Bachmanns (a PAC that spends all its money on legal fees? even SarahPAC couldn't do that), our Louie Louie Gohmerts, and our Smokey Joe Bartons because of the tension created between the "lie at the office, speak in code in the district, speak true in the office, and lie at home" in the party.
Think about it. Their politicians have to never, ever, ever say what they mean in public. At rallies, they have to whistle in the key of Gingrich and allude to poor people buying King Crab legs with SNAP funds and depriving hard working people of a chance at a barbeque (Gohmert, July 20, 2013). They have to talk about the "shakedown" of corporations by "Chicago style politics" (Smokey Joe apologizing to BP for BP's oil spill) so that their voters will hear the right message. In their homes, they have to speak to their loving spouses about their wonderful marriages -- despite the gay reparative therapy or the wide urinal stance or the prostitute's card in the wallet. That kind of tension is impossible to sustain. Eventually, you're going to get people who speak in whistles all the time.
"Yes, Ma'am, I saw a small man carrying a lawn and leaf bag twice his height across a desert, and he was chased by a man calf."
Right! How to know that Steve King's story this time is insane:
1. "For every valedictorian there are a hundred" tells you immediately that this is made up. Steve King was trying to say that DREAM-Act children should not be allowed citizenship, because, for each one who is top of a high school class, one hundred are running across the border.
First, the DREAM Act is about persons who are Americans. They simply came to the United States after birth, but before majority. If you came here at two, you are as unrelated to the country of your citizenship as Steve King is. However, he is stating that the population that would be served by DREAM Act has 100:1 smuggler to success ratio.
2. "Seventy-five pounds of marijuana on their backs": The Daily Show with John Oliver in place did the first refutation. Seventy-five pounds of marijuana is not a backpack, but rather a sleeping bag full of marijuana. Marijuana is light. Someone carrying 75 lbs. is going to be visible to the International Space Station, regardless of the comeliness of his or her calves.
3. This is not how smuggling works.
Let's play a game. Mentally, assume that you are a Mexican drug cartel.
. . . Ok, put down the tequila, and stop calling yourself Carlos Plague.
You're a drug cartel. You have a great deal of marijuana, and gringos want to smoke it. Do you allow individual growers to run seventy-five pound bags across the desert every week, or do you kill all wildcat operations and ensure that all the marijuana that goes north is your marijuana, at least by the time money is involved?
We can safely assume that King's imaginary entrepreneur with cantaloupe calves would not live. Instead, smuggling would be a cartel/gang issue. California, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee growers might be families militantly protecting their grows and sending single runners, but I think those folks are none too supportive of DREAM Act politics.
Ok, so you run the cartel. Do you send your people north, across the border overland or through tunnels to carry loads up? You're not going, as a Mexican citizen, to stay in the U.S. to do the selling to users, so do you send your people across the border, loaded up with drugs, to sell to wholesalers? Is that what you want?
If that's what you do, you won't be in business very long. D.E.A. and Homeland Security have made the border very, very rough. If your people go north, they're going to be inspected every time. You might evade the dogs a time or two, but why would you run your weakest pieces (the carriers) right at the U.S.'s strongest players? Spend a lot on boats and planes and all kinds of exciting C-movie devices, if you want, but what if there was another way?
What if, instead, you told the U.S. citizens who wholesale your drugs to come south?
We can be pretty sure that South-North drug smuggling is done by U.S. citizens, who will face less scrutiny at the border than foreign nationals.
Finally, since you're new to this cartel business, I'll let you know that it seems a fairly violent career path. In fact, it seems that the drug cartels are in a standing war with the Mexican army, the police, and each other. That's expensive. It's also hard to do. You know what would really help you? Some of those cool guns they have in the north.
The history of outlaw biker gangs and recent history with organized crime in the U.S. shows that they buy guns in Utah and Florida and take them south to Mexico, where they pick up marijuana to sell in the U.S. In fact, that's what "Fast and Furious" was supposed to be about: trying to track the U.S. side of the guns for dope trade did.
Steve King's Pablo Escobar fantasy of Maria Full of Hash is a bad trip. While the Colombian cartels would use one-time mules for cocaine, and heroin coming from the far east had all kinds of wild tales, marijuana is, as noted above, not cocaine. Steve King's story fails reality, common sense, awareness, and probably mental hygiene.