Steve King, Asshole of the Day for July 24, 2014
by TeaPartyCat (Follow @TeaPartyCat)
After 6 years almost no one is willing to go "full birther" any more. No one except Donald Trump maybe. You can’t come right out and say Obama wasn’t born in America without people tuning you out, and everyone knows that. Even the people who deep down hate him and feel he is foreign know it.
Rep. Steve King, the xenophobic congressman famous for suggesting that most immigrants are drug mules with cantaloupe-sized calves, starts a speech saying he won’t assert where Obama was born. He’s not a birther, you see. But then he plays to his crowd’s racism by suggesting Obama is foreign:
“His vision of America isn’t like our version of America. That we know,” King said of Obama. “Now I don’t assert where he was born, I will just tell you that we are all certain that he was not raised with an American experience. So these things that beat in our hearts when we hear the National Anthem and when we say the Pledge of Allegiance doesn’t beat the same for him.”Now there’s a dog-whistle— “not raised with an American experience”.
It’s true that Obama didn’t live his entire life in America, but he only lived overseas for 3 years as a child. Other than that he lived here, among Americans. His mother was an American. The grandparents he lived with were American.
Of course Rep. King doesn’t even explain what American experience it is that Obama doesn’t have, because he doesn’t have to— he knows that his crowd will know what he means.
We’re all familiar with the “I’m not racist, but…” statements, and how they are all pretty much racist. Once you start putting people in groups and making them all the same in your head, you’re in racist territory.
It’s like these people think that racism is only lynchings and Jim Crow laws, and not the wider array of discrimination that happens in life. And what is Rep. King doing if not saying “I’m not a birther, but…”? So when he starts claiming Obama doesn’t have an American experience, it’s obvious what he means. And for that, he is Asshole of the Day.
It is Steve King’s first time as Asshole of the Day.
Full story: Buzzfeed
Stephanie Doty
Weary of Wonderland
July 24, 2014
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
Weary of Wonderland
July 24, 2014
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
