Years from now, the most offensive Halloween costume won’t be blackface. It will be dressing as Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King.
For the 1,846th time while in office, King has removed all doubt about his white supremacist leanings and put his boat shoe in his Anglo-Saxon trash hole, claiming that Hurricane Katrina victims—most of whom were black—were begging for government assistance while his Iowa constituents wouldn’t dare.
According to CNN, during a speech at a town hall in his district Thursday, King noted that victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 were asking for government assistance after the devastating disaster left many homeless.
“Here’s what FEMA tells me. We go to a place like New Orleans, and everybody’s looking around saying, ‘Who’s going to help me? Who’s going to help me?’” King said, adding that he made four trips to New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, CNN reports.
“We go to a place like Iowa, and we go, we go see, knock on the door at, say, I’ll make up a name, John’s place, and say, ‘John, you got water in your basement, we can write you a check, we can help you.’ And John will say, ‘Well, wait a minute, let me get my boots. It’s Joe that needs help. Let’s go down to his place and help him,’” King said.
He added that FEMA is “always gratified when they come and see Iowans take care of each other, and so that’s a point of pride that spreads across the country everywhere that I know.”
King’s comments were addressing heavy flooding that has hit parts of Iowa and the Midwest. It might have helped if King actually compared apples to apples. Hurricane Katrina destroyed parts of New Orleans that left people without a home. Many of them had to start their lives over from scratch. Katrina was one of the worst natural disasters in American history. But, yes, King, tell me more about the water in Iowans basements. As it stands, flooding in Nebraska and Iowa has led to a handful of deaths. Katrina was responsible for more than 1,500 deaths in Louisiana alone.
Why can’t the tragedy that Iowans are facing be enough? Why does it have to be compared to black tragedy? Oh, that’s right, King is a white nationalist, so everything, including random acts of violent natural disasters, must be pushed through a black people prism.
CNN notes that “Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts sought and received federal disaster assistance funds earlier this week.”
House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, a Republican who represents a part of New Orleans, called King’s comments “absurd and offensive.”
“His comments about Katrina victims are absurd and offensive, and are a complete contradiction to the strength and resilience the people of New Orleans demonstrated to the entire nation in the wake of the total devastation they experienced,” Scalise said in a statement provided to CNN.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, called King’s comments “disgusting and disheartening.”
Rep. Cedric Richmond, a Democrat whose district includes New Orleans, tweeted:
King, who must be typing on a computer that is programmed to tweet and share the most racist shit, recently logged on to Facebook to boast that if a Civil War broke out now, the red states would “win” a fight against blue states—because red states have “8 trillion bullets.” He later removed the post.
Steve King has always been trash, but it’s like his can is overflowing as he just can’t seem to stop letting the stench out. At some point, it would be nice for Steve King, much like his counterpart David Duke, to just kind of disappear so that he becomes the old man yelling at the sky. But that would take Iowans having a call of conscience. Don’t look for that to happen anytime soon, as King’s been in office since 2005, which means they like his brand of politics, which must look a lot like theirs.