Rep. Steve King (R-IA) is as dumb as a bag of hammers. He is upset that Barack Hussein Obama is going to use his full name when he is sworn in as our 44th president. He’s upset but he can’t really articulate why he’s upset. In its simplest formulation, King’s argument is that Obama’s decision creates a double standard, whereby Obama is free to use his middle name but no one else is. Here is how Rep. King put it:
After telling the Associated Press last year that Obama’s middle name was among the reasons Islamic terrorists would rejoice over his election, King says he’s since been careful to avoid using it. Thus he found Obama’s decision to allow it be mentioned on the steps of the Capitol “bizarre” and “a double-standard.”
“Is that reserved just for him, not his critics?” King asked.
The congressman says he doubts Obama’s sincerity when he explained that he chose to use his middle name so as to be historically consistent with past inaugurations, when America has heard the full names of its presidents echo from the inaugural stand.
“Whatever his reasons are,” King said, “the one he gave us could not be the reason.”
He continued: “The society is a little strange about this. If you’re speaking the truth and in an effort to be objective, there should be nothing off limits in a free society, [but] there are many biases building and clearly a double-standard.”
It’s hard to express how stupid King’s ideas are. But let’s start with this. ‘Hussein’ is a very popular name in the Muslim world, but Rep. King is probably most familiar with two individuals: Saddam Hussein of Iraq, and King Hussein bin Talal of Jordan. The two men (both deceased) didn’t share much in common other than their names, but they were both immensely unpopular among the terrorists that attacked us on 9/11. Why?
King Hussein got on the wrong side of al-Qaeda when he made peace with Israel in 1994 and aligned his country with the United States. Saddam Hussein’s secular/fascist Ba’ath Party was always considered illegitimate by Islamists. If Muslim terrorists shared King’s limited associations with the name ‘Hussein’ (and they don’t), they would have a very negative association. They would see the name ‘Hussein’ as a negative, not a positive. They would not celebrate Obama’s election because he was named ‘Hussein’, they would share Rep. King’s negative view. But, of course, your average Muslim terrorist is not a total moron. They know that ‘Hussein’ is just a name, and a common one at that.
But that’s only one level of the The Stupid we’re dealing with here. What about that double standard? You know, the thing where Barack Obama is allowed to use his middle name but Rep. King gets criticized when he uses it? This is so simple even a caveman could understand it. If Rep. King thinks mention of Obama’s middle name creates such political vulnerability, how can he fail to understand that its use by political opponents is seen as a cheap political ploy? Are we going to legitimize the practice of making fun of people’s names like our national politics take place on an elementary school playground. The fact is that there is nothing wrong with being named ‘Hussein’…a lot of people have much more embarrassing middle names (like Delano, for example). Obama is probably proud of his name even though he knows it isn’t exactly a political asset (what with so many mental cripples like Steve King running around). He’s using his full name at his inauguration because it is his name. Maybe Rep. King will learn to expect that people named ‘Hussein’ quite often act as the chief executive of nation-states. If you want your child to rise to the top…
