Rep. Steve King (R-TXIA) isn’t just defending Rep. Joe Wilson’s (R-SC) “you lie” outburst, he’s also standing behind Wilson’s decision to vote in favor of keeping the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol. In an interview this morning on Fox News, King praised Wilson’s moral character and brushed off concerns about the racist connotations that many believe the Confederate flag imparts:

“He is an officer and a gentleman and everyone who knows him knows that…being a son of the South puts you in a different position when it comes to the Confederate flag. It means something entirely different to the people who have ancestors who fought in the Civil War on the south side of the Mason-Dixon line. So I think Maureen Dowd is trying to whip this up and I also know she’s trying to put race into it. I didn’t know what race she was talking about when I first read her line on that.”

Watch it:

It seems that King has forgotten that for many Americans, the Confederate flag represents a lot more than the “War of Northern Agression.” In fact, the decision to fly the Confederate flag over South Carolina’s Capitol was also infused with meaning. While other Southern states took down their rebel flags, an all-white South Carolina legislature fought and won to keep theirs waving above their statehouse as the Civil Rights movement picked up steam in 1962. In 2000, Wilson was one of the seven Republicans who voted to keep it there. During the 2000 fight, one of his fellow legislators — state senator Arthur Ravenel — referred to the NAACP as “the National Association of Retarded People” and later apologized to “retarded people” for associating them with the NAACP. The Confederate flag has since been moved to the Capitol lawn.

Wilson has also been a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, identified as a “source of increasingly virulent pro-Confederate, radical right propaganda.” Maureen Dowd cynically described Wilson as being part of a “loco fringe” that “clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president.”

Borzou Daragahi reports on Grand Ayatollah Ali Montazeri’s latest broadside against the Iranian regime, in which the country’s most prominent clerical dissident called on “senior Shiite Muslim clergy in the Iranian holy cities of Qom and Mashhad as well as the Iraqi shrine city of Najaf and beyond to speak out against the regime.”

In a statement issued today, [Montazeri] said that Iran had become a “military regime” not the Islamic government envisioned at time of the 1979 revolution.

He said it was his fellow clergymen’s “religious duty” to speak out against the the government’s abuses.

“We didn’t want a mere change in title and slogans while the same oppressions and violations of rights continue under the cover of Islamic government,” he said in the statement posted to his website.

The extent of clerical condemnation of the regime’s behavior in the wake of the June presidential elections, which have seriously undermined the government’s claims to uphold just Islamic principles, has been one of the most interesting and important aspects of the protests. Back in July, I spoke with Hamid Dabashi, professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, who stressed how significant it was, both in religious and constitutional terms, that “leading clerics have taken sides with the Green movement.” Because of Supreme Leader Khamenei’s relatively meager scholarly credentials, Dabashi said, he “is not even in position to prevent [other clerics] from passing judgment.” “Khamenei’s official position as Supreme Leader has no bearing on his junior position as a jurist,” said Dabashi. “He’s not in a position to disallow the clerical challenge to his authority.”

A key challenge for the Obama administration as it moves forward with its Iran engagement policy is how to create the political space for Iranians to continue to contest the regime while at the same time addressing the more immediate problems of Iran’s nuclear program and support for terrorism.