As movement conservatives declare open war on Karl Rove, Representative Steve King (R-Batshit), who was singled out by Rove as a blight on the party’s reputation, says he will not be bullied by Rove and his “war chest.”
Rep. Steve King (R-IA) on Thursday circulated an email to supporters asking for cash to stave off interloping efforts by a new Karl Rove-backed group in Iowa’s U.S. Senate race next year. [...]
“I have not made a decision on this matter, but already Karl Rove and his army have launched a crusade against me,” King wrote, according to Politico. “They said I couldn’t win in 2012 — the entire political machine was against me — but I soundly defeated my opponent by 8 percentage points. So let me be clear. Nobody can bully me out of running for the U.S. Senate, not even Karl Rove and his hefty war chest.”
Why was Steve King singled out when there are so many shinning examples of abject batshittery within the GOP? Probably because of this.
In explaining himself, King argues that animals have more rights than fetuses, and suggests that liberals have so devalued life, that a man can rape a young girl, kidnap her, force her to undergo an abortion across state lines, and then “drop her off at the swingset….and that’s not against the law in the United States of America.”
And as we learned that day, Steve King sometimes confuses reality with the sick fantasies in his head.
More on the “GOP Civil War” and Karl Rove’s Conservative Defeat Project.
“There is now an out in the open civil war within the Republican Party,” conservative Iowa radio host Steve Deace wrote in a Politico op-ed this week. [...]
After pantheon of Tea Party campaign groups (The Club for Growth, FreedomWorks and Tea Party Express) bashed the new effort, on Wednesday a cluster of conservative leaders demanded the new organization fire its spokesman, Jonathan Collegio, for calling Brent Bozell, a pundit who runs the conservative Media Research Center, a “hater” in a recent radio interview. Collegio had alleged that Bozell, a critic, has an ax to grind against Rove.
If you aren’t familiar, the man various Tea Party groups are defending, Brent Bozell, is an exemplary member of the far right whose file of egregious statements is a mile long. Perhaps none are as infamous as this, however.
BOZELL: How long do you think Sean Hannity’s show would last if four times in one sentence, he made a comment about, say, the President of the United States, and said that he looked like a skinny, ghetto crackhead? Which, by the way, you might want to say that Barack Obama does. Everybody on the left would come forward and demand he be fired within five minutes for being so insulting towards a leader of the United States.
For what it’s worth, Karl Rove’s “Victory Project” is right to go after men like Steve King and Brent Bozell if they want to win elections in the future, but the spokesperson for the Victory Project has already been forced to apologize for his comments about Bozell by the Tea Party Inquisition.
It will be increasingly difficult for the Republicans to oppose the president’s agenda in lockstep if they cannot agree on what direction the the party should go in.
Or as we say around here — keep going, you’re doing great!