I’m not sure what Pete Hoekstra was thinking when he decided to campaign across Michigan today with Rep. Steve King of Iowa, but I’m sure it wasn’t an attempt to win over independent voters who aren’t necessarily big fans of incumbent Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow.
King, an Iowa Republican, is known as one of the most extreme right-wingers in Congress. And he’s also established a reputation for making bizarre comments – sort of like the male version of Michele Bachmann.
Speaking of which, Hoekstra has also welcomed Bachmann’s endorsement of his Senate candidacy, along with the support of Sharon Angle, an outspoken tea party candidate who lost a 2010 Senate bid in Nevada.
Today, the Holland Republican embraced King’s endorsement just one week after the congressman suggested that the country would be put “back in order” if only male landowners (presumably white male landowners only) could vote, like in the days immediately after the adoption of the U.S. Constitution.
King said later he was only daydreaming aloud, but critics saw the remarks, made openly at a congressional hearing, as crude. But the lawmaker didn’t stop there.
He asserted that allowing Americans other than male property owners to vote had created an imbalance because the rest of the populace does not “have skin in the game.” The congressman went on to say that allowing people who don’t have a job to vote means the unemployed will merely vote themselves “more government benefits.”
The Michigan Democratic Party jumped all over this new Hoekstra-King alliance, pointing to some of King’s past controversial remarks: defending torture and abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq; erroneously claiming in 2006 while the Iraq war was still raging that American troops in Iraq were safer than a civilian in Washington, D.C.; calling disgraced former senator Joe McCarthy “a great American hero;” and suggesting illegal immigrants could be rounded up and treated similarly to “livestock.”
One other thing. To bolster his argument that only a certain segment of the population should have the right to vote, King offered that nearly 50 percent of Americans pay no taxes. Of course, that’s a common misconception because the 47 percent singled out by King pay no federal income taxes — but they pay several other kinds of taxes.
Worse yet, King said the number of unemployed in the U.S. has now reached 100 million – yes, nearly one-third of the nation’s population is now jobless under President Obama, in King’s world.
The true number of jobless is about 14 million and, given King’s track record for wildly inaccurate and misleading statements, I would guess that the lawmaker is adding the unemployed to a list that includes the number of retirees, minor children, stay-at-home moms, and the disabled to come up with a number that means – well, nothing.
