Encyclopedia of American Loons #209: ¨Michele Bachman's chief competition for the title of most idiotic Representative in Congress...¨



Diagnosis: Pathologically ignorant moron. And people keep electing him. Amazing.

Meet #209: Steve King

¨Steven Arnold “Steve” King is the U.S. Representative (Republican) for Iowa's 5th congressional district. He is Michele Bachman's chief competition for the title of most idiotic Representative in Congress (they make an apt pair, though). Among his more recent not particularly intelligent assertions is his claim that if the estate tax was allowed to increase, rich people would kill themselves on Dec. 31 in order to avoid having to pay it after they're dead.

King is, predictably, not in favor of gay marriage, arguing that “I think that if we can't defend marriage, that it becomes very hard to defend life.” Now, you may wonder what that means and how he arrived at the conclusion, and it is not entirely clear (you can read it in context here). It seems that the conclusion is arrived at through the infamous inference rule “word-salad introduction” (related to Arthur Prior’s “tonk”-operator but more obfuscatory). A similar (I think) argument is this one. He is on more familiar (but hardly more intelligent) grounds with his standard slippery slope argument that recognizing homosexuality entails recognizing pedophilia...¨ HERE

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