King Kong Krazy: One Congressman's Descent Into Ideological Madness

By Douglas W. Burns

Douglas Burns has reported on Iowa politics for a variety of Iowa news organizations and publications for more than 20 years. In that time, he has written dozens of columns and news stories on Iowa’s now infamous U.S. Representative Steve King.

King Kong Krazy is a collection of those columns and stories, one which reveals the increasingly deranged nature of King’s beliefs and rhetoric while also contextualizing the (mostly) rural Iowa district which repeatedly sends King to represent it in the U.S. Congress.

Taken as a whole, this collection of material paints a fuller picture of one of the more divisive figures in modern politics as well as revealing Burns to be, at times, a prescient “canary in a cornfield” with regard to the rural and rust-belt resentment that brought Steve King-like rhetoric and policy to our national politics and, ultimately, to the White House.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9780359628933

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King Kong Krazy: One Congressman's Descent Into Ideological Madness

KING KONG KRAZY

One Congressman’s Descent Into

Ideological Madness

Douglas W. Burns

Copyright

Copyright © 2019 by Douglas W. Burns

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

Cover art by Beckham G Miller

Edited by Jennifer Pellant

First Printing: 2019

ISBN 978-0-359-62893-3

Dedicated to the late Art Neu

Author’s Note

U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, has cultivated a national reputation for attention-grabbing remarks that delight his conservative supporters and appall liberal critics. The latter find his rhetoric fanatical, nativist, and at times racist. But even constituents troubled by the Congressman’s runaway mouth have to concede that King has become something of a voice for western Iowa in the instantaneous news world.

King’s rant that al-Qaeda would welcome the election of Senator Barack Obama with dancing in the streets was heard around the world within 24 hours. The remark echoed other Kingisms in its fact-free content, its casual impugning of the patriotism of people who disagree with him, and its careful delivery.

King’s provocations, he admitted in a Downtown Sioux City Rotary Club meeting, covered by Bret Hayworth of The Sioux City Journal, are carefully contrived for maximum effect.

According to King, he plans everything he says, no matter how ‘provocative’ — it’s weighed ahead of time, never off the cuff, and designed to stir discussion of key issues. ‘What kind of a nation are we if we can’t have open dialogue?’ King asserted.

The disarming, if not disingenuous, plea for dialogue, coming from a man not known for his civility is another sign of King’s style. One on one, King can be quite personable, even with critical journalists or liberal Democrats. Founder of a construction company, he knows the ways of rural Iowa and how to connect with a crowd. He got himself elected as a state senator in tiny Kiron before winning the mostly Republican 5th Congressional district seat in 2002.

I have covered him for the past 18 years. Here are some of the stories and columns. Taken collectively they paint a fuller picture of one of the more divisive figures in modern politics.

— Douglas W. Burns, Columnist, Reporter, and Co-owner, Herald Publishing Co.

September 20, 2002

Is King an errand boy for the rich?

Steve King may have moved dirt around for a living.

He may be a salt-of-the-earth guy, the founder of a construction company who isn’t stretching the truth at all when he talks about hatching ideas and mulling over life philosophies while operating a bulldozer.

And on the stump, he may sound like a latter-day William Jennings Bryan in his spirited defense of all things rural.

But the Fifth District Republican congressional candidate’s position on a national sales tax is hardly the thinking of a politician who truly has the working man’s interests at heart.

Actually, it’s not the thinking of a thinking man. In fact, King’s hawking of a 15 percent national sales tax to replace the federal income tax and most other national taxes, is nothing short of a gift bag for the richest Americans.

Self-cast politically as the patron saint of practical prairie people, the ultra-conservative King is revealing himself with this scheme to be little more than a puppet for the patrician set, an errand boy for the croquet and cocktail crowd.

If he gets his ridiculous tax plan through Congress, what’s King going to do next, clean 9-irons for Augusta National’s membership? Polish their yachts?

This assessment doesn’t come from a liberal think tank or Mother Jones magazine.

Scott Fullwiler, James Leach Chair in Banking and Monetary Economics at Wartburg College, says the bottom line is that King’s tax plan would benefit the rich at the expense of working-class folks.

Replacing the federal tax code with a national sales tax would necessarily result in the overall tax code taxing a higher percent of income from lower and middle-income earners than it does from high-income earners, Fullwiler said in an interview with the Daily Times Herald.

Translation: Rich win, poor lose.

Lower- and middle-class people — most of western Iowa — save less of their incomes and spend more on items affected by a sales tax, Fullwiler notes.

Of all our revenue sources, from sales taxes to property taxes to user fees, the income tax is the most progressive. About 30 percent of working Americans don’t even pay federal income tax because they don’t make enough money, Fullwiler said.

All the people in Carroll who were opposed to the one-cent local option sales tax were absolutely right when they tagged it regressive. It is.

But a one-cent add-on is a far cry from a 15-cent national tax that would make our sales tax in Iowa 20 percent.

One can’t help but think that if the very vocal opponents of the local-option plan were so passionate about that cent that they may have some thoughts about a 15-cent national sales tax.

Who knows? Maybe they’ll like it. Maybe they will applaud King as he talks about dismantling the Internal Revenue Service.

King’s a persuasive politician, one of the more earnest around.

He’ll make the tax sound wonderfully simple.

The rich buy more televisions and stereos so they’ll pay more taxes, he argues.

He won’t get to the part about actual percentages, about how when the money is counted in Washington, D.C., it’s the people who clock in every day carrying more of the load than the rich.

No, King will make paying sales taxes sound like a volunteer effort, a sunny act of kindness, not a rainy April day.

The sales tax is an elective one because if you don’t want to pay it, well, you just don’t buy something, King told the Times Herald in explaining the tax.

King says poor people who pay the whopping sales tax on medicine and old people who pay it on food (as all would under his plan) will be reimbursed with checks from the federal government each month. He fails to explain how the logistics of this potential paperwork calamity would work, or how the federal agency charged with the task would be any better than the IRS.

So far, King’s campaign has been one of brilliant simplicity. He emerged from a four-candidate primary field by appealing to the hearts of Republicans in this very, very conservative district.

King is lucky people around here vote with their hearts, not their minds.

As with all simple solutions on taxes, King has reached too far and bought into something that will hurt the very people he purports to champion.

He may not know what he’s doing. But King’s radical overhaul of the tax system isn’t something people making $25,000 a year are going to want.

Then again, maybe King, with his victory all but assured, is looking out for people making a lot more money these days.

May 11, 2004

King’s comparisons are un-American

Former Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey didn’t choose Jackie Robinson to break Major League Baseball’s color barrier because he was the best African-American player available.

To be sure, Robinson was great. But there were arguably better baseball players in the Negro Leagues in the 1940s.

Robinson got the historic call up because he could take the pressure of an unimaginably unfair scenario, a life full of taunts and heckling and jeers and threats.

That he could be dignified under such a barrage of racist outbursts, that he