Just a week ago, Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe suggested that President Obama might be impeached over the Benghazi non-scandal. Now, Inhofe must watch as Obama declares Inhofe’s state a disaster area and promises Oklahomans “all the resources they need at their disposal.”
Inhofe, of course, believes his state deserves those resources, even though he voted down aid to Hurricane Sandy victims. On MSNBC, Chris Jansing confronted Inhofe about his calling the Sandy aid bill a “slush fund,” and the brazen right-winger insisted the two issues shouldn’t be linked.
“Let’s look at that, that was totally different,” Inhofe told Jansing. “They were getting things — for instance that was supposed to be in New Jersey, they had things in the Virgin Islands, they were fixing roads there, they were putting roofs on houses in Washington, D.C.; everyone was getting in and exploiting the tragedy taking place. That won’t happen in Oklahoma.”
Inhofe’s answer is too dishonest to fully parse. First of all, there was Sandy damage way beyond New Jersey, including in the Caribbean and in Washington, D.C., too. And Inhofe had different objections to the Sandy bill at the time. In a rambling, hard-to-follow Senate floor speech blocking Sandy aid last December, the Oklahoma conservative objected to the bill’s timing — “There’s always a lot of theater right before Christmas time … We shouldn’t be talking about it right before Christmas” — even though it was already going on two months since the storm ravaged the East Coast.
Inhofe was also exercised by the fact that the Sandy bill included what he said was $28 billion for future disasters. But the climate-change denier was particularly outraged that the bill included $3.5 billion to deal with what he called “global warming,” which led to a long rant against cap-and-trade legislation, and then his floor speech unraveled. (Interestingly, Inhofe’s own press operation put the incoherent speech up on YouTube, as though it was a proud moment for the senator.)
Oklahoma’s other GOP senator, Tom Coburn, brags that he’s going to seek tornado relief — but insist that the funding is “offset” by other cuts to the federal budget. Coburn is proud that he’s being consistent by placing the same conditions on disaster aid to his own state as he’s demanded elsewhere. Consistent, maybe — but also fundamentally cruel.
