There are few nastier rightwingers in the House than Rep. Steve King of Iowa. You may remember him as saying the torture at Abu Grahib was no worse than a fraternity hazing. Now the McCain supporter has let loose with a preview of the smear campaign against Barack Obama being readied by the GOP to unleash as soon as Obama becomes the Democratic nominee.

Tellingly, King — no relation to the horror novelist Stephen King — begins his screed with a passive-agressive tell: “I don’t want to disparage anyone because of their race, their ethnicity, their name, whatever the religion of their father might have been.” And then of course, he goes on to disparage Obama for exactly those reasons.

Here’s a rough, incomplete transcript:

“I don’t want to disparage anyone because of their race, their ethnicity, their name, whatever the religion of their father might have been. I’ll just say this, that when you think about the optics of a Barack Obama potentially getting elected president of the United States, I mean, what does this look like to the rest of the world? What does this look like to the world of Islam?” King said Friday during an interview in KICD studios in Spencer. “And I will tell you that if he is elected president, then the radical islamists, the al Qaida and the radical Islamists and their supporters Will be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11th.”

And here’s more, specifically regarding Obama’s middle name: “It does matter. His middle name does matter. It matters because they read meaning into that and the rest of the world, it has special meaning to them. They’ll be dancing in the streets because of his middle name. They’ll be dancing in the streets because of who his father was and because of his posture that says pull out of the Middle East and pull out of this conflict. So there are implications that have to do with who he is and the positions that he has taken. If he were strong on national defense and said, ‘I’m going to go over there and we’re going to fight and we’re going to win. We’ll come home with a victory,’ that’s different, but that’s not what he’s said. There will be dancing in the streets if he’s elected president and that has a chilling effect on how difficult it will be to ever win this global war on terror,” King said.