Rep. Steve King was trying to set the record straight on Monday in posting on his site's donation page a YouTube clip of his May comments in which he appeared to defend America's legal immigration system as an exemplar of a selective process and compared picking which immigrants can legally enter the country to picking bird dogs. "In this video it is clear I complimented legal immigrants," King wrote in a caption beneath the video. What he -- or whichever employee of his was responsible -- didn't know was that the clip had been put up by American Bridge, a liberal Super PAC set up to discredit Republican politicians. When that group discovered what King had done, it went back into its YouTube account and altered the clip.
Go to the site now and you'll see a series of pop-ups added to the video toward the beginning. The first one, a caption with large white letters, reads, "Don't listen to Steve King's excuses. Comparing immigrants to dogs is just plain offensive." Seconds later, another pop-up comment appears and remains there for the whole of the video. "Click here to watch more of Steve King's extreme remarks," it reads.
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That link takes viewers to another YouTube video from American Progress titled "Steve King's Extreme Remarks" - a compilation put together by the political action committee which, in addition to the "bird dog" clip, features another in which the Iowa representative draws a parallel between immigrants and animals. In it, King speaks about border fencing strategies during a speech on the House floor, and he has brought along a prop: a small-scale model border fence.
"We can also electrify this wire," King says as he strings mock barbed wire across the top of the model fence. "We do that with livestock all the time."
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King has been lambasted for the "bird dogs" comment by critics who say he compared immigrants to dogs. Beneath the video on his donation page, King wrote that he had "received dozens of messages from Hispanics who have watched the video letting me know it was complimentary and many of them declared their disgust for the way the left has tried to twist my words."
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American Bridge spokesman Chris Harris told Politico that King "has made a series of excuses and cop-outs to avoid being held accountable for his record", adding, "We will continue our work to show voters in Iowa and across the country that Steve King is the face of today's Republican Party and a major roadblock to comprehensive immigration reform."
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