In this, his third year in Congress, it’s incredulous that people have to ask, “Can you believe Steve King called Joe McCarthy a great American hero?” Why the mock shock? It’s absolutely believable. Joe McCarthy seems exactly the kind of guy King would look up to. Paranoid. Suspicious. Stiffling.

It’s so easy to find something to loathe in King’s pronouncements that it’s no longer a fair sport. The question isn’t whether something will spill out of his mouth to make many Iowans want to disinherit him, but when we’ll once again be in the position of having to apologize for him.

Just when the uproar over his wanting to build a big fence along the border died down, the Western Iowa congressman praised McCarthy as the U.S. House of Representatives was about to vote on a proposal to name a post office in Berkeley, Calif., in honor of Maudelle Shirek. A 94-year-old former Berkeley city councilwoman and community rabble-rouser, she was just the kind of person targeted in a campaign of fear and intimidation we call McCarthyism.

Though a tireless activist who fought discrimination and poverty on all fronts in a tumultuous social revolution that history remembers as righteous, Shirek also has been tied to the Communist Party U.S.A. So King made a big speech about Shirek’s departure from “American values,” starting a verbal fistfight with California Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who said the Iowan’s rhetoric was “better suited to the era of Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover than today’s House of Representatives.” That’s when King said thanks, in so many words, and that he’d accept the compliment.

Incidentally, the proposal failed by 25 votes, so America remains safe from a building bearing the name of a communist sympathizer. The Cold War is over, but Americans still aren’t keen for communists. The proposal might have been deafeated even without King blurting out that he views McCarthy as “a great American hero.” But don’t you sometimes wish he’d just keep his extreme views to himself, just once, out of respect for his fellow Iowans who don’t tilt quite as far to the right?

Extremists almost never do that. And we should be glad about that. In general, it’s good to know what people who hate civil liberties think, especially when they have the bully pulpit of the U.S. House of Representatives. What these people are thinking should not be a secret.

There’s not much more moderate-thinking Iowans – even Doug Gross, the 2002 Republican gubernatorial candidate, blasted King for his revisionist history on McCarthy’s alleged greatness – can do to keep King from embarrassing us. When he does, we can publicly purge the bile left his intolerant rhetoric leaves in our stomachs by reminding the rest of the world that King is an anomaly who represents almost none of us. Or we can try to turn him into an asset of sorts, evidence that Iowa, knocked nationally for its lack of diversity, is most certainly diverse in thought. Or we can look at King for what he is: one of the many contradictions in Iowa. Explain him the same way we explain how Iowa can at the same time be touted nationally as one of the best places to raise children, but also be one of the country’s reigning methamphetamine capitals.

And we can hope that a more progressive breeze will blow through Western Iowa before the next congressional elections. We don’t expect the conservative Republicans in that part of the state to suddenly produce a liberal candidate. But surely they can do better than King.