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Senator James Inhofe is a dangerous idiot

Lots of emotional words were spilled on and immediately after September 11, 2001. Who could forget Ann Coulter, mourning her friend and equally-rabid Clinton-hater Barbara Olson in a column, when she said, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." (Note that it wasn't enough to defeat them -- they had to adopt our beliefs by force, too.) Or Jerry Falwell blaming it on the gays and the ACLU, apologizing to reduce the heat but bragging about it in later fund-raising to arch-conservatives?

OK, try this quote on for size:

One of the reason I believe the spiritual door was opened for an attack against the United States of America is that the policy of our government has been to ask the Israelis, and demand it with pressure, not to retaliate in a significant way against the terrorist strikes that have been launched against them.

Make sure you got that: the speaker says God allowed terrorists to attack the US on September 11, when previously He would not have, because He is upset about the US's Israel policy.

The speaker? US Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Okla), a homegrown idiot. Like Coulter and Falwell, he hasn't disavowed his remarks in any serious way. Unlike the other right-wingers, he delivered these comments in March 2002, six months after the attacks.

Inhofe is the kind of person who doesn't belong in elected office because he's both ignorant and dangerous. As David Corn's article chronicles, Inhofe has taken the Senate floor and demanded that because his literal reading of the Bible (specifically, Genesis 13.14-17) says that God gave the West Bank to Abraham and his descendants, the US is violating God's law with any policy other than elimination of Palestinians from any territory Abraham could have seen from Hebron 4,000 years ago.

Corn writes, "In Inhofe's mind, these few sentences in the Bible decide the matter, end of story. This is fundamentalism. And not too far a throw from the Islamic fundamentalism used by terrorists who point to the Koran to justify their actions." Other than assuming Inhofe has a mind, he's right. Inhofe and his ilk have absolutely no tolerance for any individual who believes anything other than what they believe about the Bible. Alternate interpretations, even alternate translations, are the work of the Devil, and anyone who uses them must be resisted if not imprisoned.

An exercise for readers interested in broad aspects of religion: try going into a major bookstore, like a Border's or Barnes & Noble store, and look through the "religion" section. You'll see books exploring historical and sociological aspects of the Bible, literal and non-literal interpretations, modern theology, and all aspects of thought for Christianity and for other religions as well. Authors include Peter Gomes, John Spong, Billy Graham, Max Lucado -- a wide variety of theological positions.

Try the same trick in a "Christian" bookstore like Mardel's. You'll find cases full of King James Bibles and New International Version Bibles (slanted to support conservative points of view), several New King James Versions, several Living Bibles (a conservative paraphrase of the Bible), and few of any other translations. You can find the New American Standard Version because conservatives view it as the "most literal" translation, with little effort to express thoughts from Hebrew or Greek. Modern translations like the New Revised Standard Version (widely considered by mainstream Protestants as the most direct and scholarly translation) or the Contemporary English Version are rarely to be found because they're not conservative enough. However, you'll find at least half a shelf of books explaining why every translation other than the 1611 King James Version is heretical and how people who read them are going to Hell.

But I digress.

Inhofe is one of the least effective senators ever. All he does is spout vitriolic fundamentalist rhetoric, vote the far-right party line, and tour military bases at US expense. He brags about having run in 1994 on a platform of "God, guns, and gays", and ran the most negative campaigns in Oklahoma's history (and believe me, we are not a shy state). The only campaign commercials he ran in 1996 attacked his opponents.

It was Inhofe who personally blocked the nomination of James Hormel as ambassador to Luxembourg because Hormel is gay, saying for years that Luxembourg would not accept a gay ambassador, keeping up this rant long after the country itself told the US it would welcome Hormel and his life partner. Hormel easily had the support of two-thirds of the Senate, but Inhofe blocked the nomination, and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott let him do it. When President Clinton appointed Hormel via a recess appointment in the best possible tradition -- because Hormel would have been confirmed if Inhofe hadn't blocked the vote -- Inhofe threw a tantrum and, for a few days, blocked all of the President's appointments because he didn't get his fundamentalist way.

Not surprisingly, when President George W. Bush used recess appointments to get Eugene Scalia and Otto Reich in office inthe worst tradition -- because the Senate would not have confirmed them -- Inhofe issued a press release praising the recess appointments while still pretending to oppose them. Inhofe tried to save face in 1999 by complaining that Clinton didn't notify the Senate of his intentions, but Clinton did notify the Senate. Inhofe just doesn't like to admit it, nor that both Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush made far more recess appointments than Clinton ever did, for worse reasons.

Inhofe did his best to paint Hormel's sex life as salacious, but when his own staff was caught having downloaded massive amounts of pornography onto their official Senate computers, Inhofe suddenly said he wouldn't comment "in deference to legitimate privacy concerns."

Inhofe's major goals as a senator are to insert his fundamentalist religion throughout the US government, and to make sure the US military attacks any country that interferes with his idea of a Christian world. Inhofe sponsored the Religious Freedom Amendment that would have required accommodation of religion in all government actions, specifically in schools. When queried about how he'd feel when schools would have to let Muslim students pray to Allah five times per day or to provide vegetarian meals for Buddhists, or to allow Wiccans or Druids to conduct their ceremonies on school property and proseltyze other students, Inhofe said that, basically, anything other than Judaism or Christianity isn't a "real" religion and wouldn't be constitutionally protected. To Inhofe, "religion" means "Christianity." Prayer in schools means Christian prayer, and protecting religious expression means protecting Christian expression. He's not interested in protecting any other faiths -- in fact, since he believes Christ is the only way to God, other faiths are dangerous to him.

When the Murrah Building was bombed on April 19, 1995, Inhofe was asked how many people worked in the building. His first instinct? Insult federal workers as slothful bureaucrats: he said, "It depends on how many federal workers played hookey today."

Inhofe is so reliable a right-wing vote that there's no sense in even trying to negotiate with him. He demanded that Clinton remove troops from the Balkan republics unless Congress declared war, but has no such trouble with current operations, even going so far as to visit Cuba and give the Guantanamo Bay prison complex two thumbs up. In 2001, Inhofe was so determined to push the GOP agenda that, even after September 11, he delayed Senate business needlessly by attaching a rider to open ANWR to drilling to every bill the Senate considered.

Inhofe is up for re-election this year, but he's got an uphill battle. He has a big campaign chest, and his likely Democratic opponent is former Oklahoma Governor David Walters. In the 1990s, Walters took a plea-bargain and pled guilty to accepting excess campaign contributions, a misdemeanor plea that dismissed felony indictments. Walters said he had no knowledge that some supporters donated more than was allowed, but accepted responsibility because he signed the campaign forms.

The real problem is that Oklahoma only hears one side of this. The Daily Oklahoman, the state's largest newspaper, has been labelled as the Worst Newspaper in America by the Columbia Journalism Review because its editor and publisher freely admit they're trying to advance a conservative agenda instead of report the news. The Oklahoman dogged Walters incessantly, and local TV stations followed suit. When blessed GOP governor Frank Keating was considered for Bush's Attorney General, it took Newsweek to report that Keating had taken $25,000 per year for ten years from a rich donor trying to get Keating to recommend that Oklahoma prisons use a mind-altering drug on inmates. Keating did urge the Corrections Department to study the issue, but the drug was never used. Keating at first said the money was for his kids' college education, then when that unraveled, he tried a few more stories before it came out that Keating had just unethically taken the money, since before he was governor, and never reported it to anyone.

Where was the Oklahoman on this story? Nowhere -- it had been there the whole time, but the paper doesn't investigate Republicans. Instead, it ran story after story after story about Walters's son, an OU student, being busted for having marijuana. A year later, the son killed himself.

None of the Oklahoma media outlets bothered reporting Inhofe's fundamentalist rant on the Senate floor, or his attaching ANWR to every bill, or even that on September 12, 2001, Inhofe blocked a Customs Service nomination the White House had listed as "critical" because he wanted the Customs service to test plastic-detecting technology from a company represented by a close friend and campaign contributor.

In recent Oklahoman articles, the paper covers Inhofe's frantic attempts to save the Crusader missile that hawks like him want even though Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld does not. It's partially excusable -- the missile was to be built here in Oklahoma. Even so, Inhofe and pathetic Oklahoma congressman Wes Watkins are trying to spend billions on the Crusader but say, even with it off the table, there's no more room for aid to Oklahoma for health care to the poor. (It's even understandable for joke-of-a-representative J.C. Watts to boycott a Bush event over the Crusader, since it was to be built in his district.)

Walters doesn't really want to be a senator, but says that because Inhofe always votes the party line, Oklahoma doesn't get its share of federal dollars. In fact, Oklahoma is a donor state -- its citizens pay more in federal taxes than they get back in federal services. Inhofe's votes are completely predictable. He gets a zero rating from NOW on women's issues, a 24% rating from the ACLU, a 0% rating from Population Growth (formerly ZPG), but a 100% rating from the National Association of Convenience Stores, and always a 100% rating from the Christian Coalition. In 1996, Inhofe was the only senator to vote the GOP party line 100% of the time.

Three and a half years ago, Slate said that Inhofe was "widely considered one of the dumbest members of Congress," and Inhofe has done nothing to change that. Half of Walters's attention would make a senator twice what Inhofe has done in eight years. The real question is if Oklahoma voters will even hear the debate. In 1996, the media barely even covered the Senate race, deciding in March that Inhofe would win and not spending the money to cover the race after that. (The Oklahoman wouldn't have covered it if it were a horse race, preferring to anoint Inhofe in reward for toeing the party line.)

The senate primary in Oklahoma isn't until August, and there's some coverage on the Democratic side (Inhofe is running unopposed for the GOP). It remains to be seen if there will be substantive, daily coverage of the race this fall, or if the TV stations prefer to concentrate on trying the Ab-Flex or sending crews to film kittens in trees. You can be fairly sure, though, that voters won't be told about Inhofe's fundamentalist rants, his absolute dogmatic inflexibility in voting, or his raving hypocrisy -- unless Walters pays for ads to tell you, if the TV stations will accept them. Even then, Inhofe runs some of the nastiest negative campaigns on record.

Oklahoma is not a stupid state, just one that's misinformed and suffering from a massive inferiority complex. Getting rid of Inhofe and his ilk would be a great step towards standing on our own again. I'm not yet holding my breath.

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