As we leave the Iowa State Fair to its own devices, and to Rick Perry, who is someone else's device, we discover that the avatar for most of the Republican politics-on-a-stick practiced here is not found outside the Agriculture Building, but all the way east in Maryland, where a member of Governor Larry Hogan's cabinet named Kenneth Holt managed to crystallize most of the policy proposals, and all of the rhetoric, that rolled out from the artfully displayed hay bales of the Des Moines Register's soapbox.

Holt is Maryland's secretary of housing, community and development, and he is wise to the ways of America's crafty poor people. Holt is seeking to "relax" Maryland's lead-poisoning law in order to take the jackboot of regulation off the necks of the state's landlords. And nothing gets by Kenneth Holt.

Kenneth C. Holt, secretary of Housing, Community and Development, told an audience at the Maryland Association of Counties summer convention here that a mother could just put a lead fishing weight in her child's mouth, then take the child in for testing and a landlord would be liable for providing the child with housing until the age of 18. Pressed afterward, Holt said he had no evidence of this happening but said a developer had told him it was possible. "This is an anecdotal story that was described to me as something that could possibly happen," Holt said.

Back in 2014, Maryland elected a Tea Party loon named Larry Hogan to be its governor, and Hogan obviously found a like-minded bag of interesting thoughts to run the state's housing policy. Kenneth Holt clearly will believe anything. And he is not alone. Because intra-Republican politics is now almost exclusively dedicated to finding Others against whom you can run, Republican audiences are perfectly willing to buy the notion that clever moms are having their children suck on lead weights to stick it to their landlords and get something for nothing. Within the Republican Party, there is a relentless search for solutions to problems that do not exist, and an equally relentless search for suckers in the general public.

On Saturday, Scott Walker came to the Iowa State Fair and bragged about how, under his watch, welfare recipients have to be drug tested and all voters need an ID. Both of these tough-guy measures have been demonstrated over and over again to be profound wastes of time and money. But that's not the point of either of them. They're about being on Your Side against people who are Not You. So is Donald Trump's dead-on-arrival, unconstitutional immigration plan. They're all Kenneth Holt, snooping around to find poor children with lead weights in their mouths who are victimizing unsuspecting landlords, who just want to rent apartments that poison people. The main goal is to get the country to be complicit in the fairy tales.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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