Rep. Steve King (R-IA) has uttered so many stupid things that it’s hard to document all of them. At some point his buffoonery raises the question of the sanity of the voters in his district for sending someone so untethered to represent them. Some highlights (or is it lowlights?), courtesy of Think Progress:

1. King is the leading defender of dog-fighting and animal torture in the United States. King recently suggested “there was something wrong” with the priorities of people who wanted to criminalize dogfighting while boxing was legal.

2. King compares immigrants to dogs, proposes keeping them out with electrified fence.

3. King believes states can ban birth control and that contraception may destroy America.

4. King tends birther. King personally searched for and discovered Obama’ birth announcement in Hawaii newspapers, he remains unconvinced that Obama was born inside the United States.

5. King sympathized with a terrorist and secessionism. After being informed of an attempted right-wing suicide attack on an IRS building, King expressed empathy with the terrorist’s motives, saying “It’s sad the incident in Texas happened, but by the same token, it’s an agency that is unnecessary and when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the IRS, it’s going to be a happy day for America.”

But today’s lame-@ss claim — that his personal freedom is being attacked by the fact the government has mandated speed limits (and it is affecting our economy) — is really a shark-jumper. I guess he has no important business to attend to for Iowans. He actually took to the House floor to complain about the 55-mile-per-hour speed limit in his state:

“There I am driving down the road looking at cornfields, which I love to look at, at 55 miles an hour. I thought, ‘Why am I doing this?’” he said. “Well, it must be the nanny state that has imposed this on me.”

King pointed out he could have gotten to his destination faster if he drove 65 miles per hour, instead of wasting time on the road.

“You calculate that each one of us on the day we were born was granted the actuarial number — at that time I figured it at 76 years — when you figure those hours that you have in your lifetime at 76 years and then you figure out how many hours you spend unnecessarily looking out the windshield at 55 miles an hour, and you calculate the lifespan, and you divide it into the time saved and the miles that are traveled on rural roads in Iowa each year,” he said.

“And it came down to this: that if we drive 65 instead of 55, we will have saved 79.64 lifetimes of living, in other words, getting to our destination, doing something productive. That has value too,” he said.

I guess King would like to see a free-for-all Autobahn on American highways; and while we’re at it, I suppose we should do away with seat belts, bicycle helmets, pollution regulations, food safety laws and all of those other measures suppressing his freedoms.

It would probably not surprise you that King opposes low-flow shower heads as well as energy-efficient light bulbs, referring to traditional incandescent ones as  ”patriotic Edison bulbs.”

He receives bonus points for saying that he wouldn’t change anything about American history — including the slavery era.

Could you reverse engineer the United States of America and come up with a better result that what we have here? Could you go back through history and turn us in history in any way where our mortal wisdom could supersede the actual history that we’ve experienced as a country? I say not.