Tornado Only The Third-Biggest Bag Of Wind In Oklahoma This Week

Spackle-brained dick weasel Sen. James Inhofe is bad at so many, many things. He does not understand legally defined standards of treatment for prisoners of war. He thinks he understands science better than actual scientists. He is even a shitty pilot. In fact, the only marketable skill James Inhofe possesses is his innate ability to be a spackle-brained dick weasel. Luckily for him that there exists a job for which this skill is a feature and not a bug: United States senator!

Yesterday a corner of Inhofe’s home state got flattened like an anthill stomped by a hyperactive five-year-old. Most humans who viewed the footage were moved to tears or anger or tears of anger. Inhofe's colleague Tom Coburn, no slouch himself in the spackle-brained dick weasel department, was moved as well … right to the nearest television camera, where he stated that he would be happy to ask the federal government for financial help in cleaning up and rebuilding, just so long as Congress found some budget "offsets" elsewhere. So the folks in Oklahoma can have some help after this terrible tragedy so long as some other folks in Florida or Arkansas or New York agree to go without food or medical care for a while. This argle bargle was followed by a collective BANG! as if millions of heads struck millions of desks at the exact same moment. Then everyone started reminding Coburn and Inhofe about their votes against the Hurricane Sandy relief bill last year, which made them look like heartless skinsacks.

Today Inhofe went on the TV box himself, where a news anchor asked him if maybe he wasn't being a tiny bit hypocritical in demanding federal aid for Oklahoma after denying it to New Jersey. That was when we learned that James Inhofe, in addition to having a hypocritical streak wider than Ari Fleischer's forehead, also sucks at geography (or knowledge of any kind really):

Inhofe contended on Tuesday that the Hurricane Sandy relief bill was different because it was filled with pork. “They were getting things, for instance, that was supposed to be in New Jersey,” he said on MSNBC. “They had things in the Virgin Islands. They were fixing roads there, they were putting roofs on houses in Washington, D.C.”

Ha ha yes, it is not as if the ("U.S.") Virgin Islands or Washington D.C. were also affected by Hurricane Sandy. Is James Inhofe, the chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, unaware that hurricanes are formed out in the ocean and, like Sandy, travel thousands of miles through the Caribbean and up the Eastern Seaboard, laying waste to wide swaths of land?

Actually, he might not be. As yr Doktor Zoom said, hurricanes are large and sprawling like the federal government, while tornadoes are limited and local, like state governments.

Or maybe he just meant Sandy aid should have gone to New Jersey and New Jersey only because it is the only state in that thar those parts with a Republican governor? Actually, that is probably it.

It is hard to think of a more dickish behavior in these circumstances than horse-trading with other senators for program cuts in order to get some relief for your own constituents who just saw their lives reduced to piles of rubble and their loved ones crushed under falling bricks, or pounding your chest about how your people are awesome while all those East Coasters are a bunch of slush-fund-hoovering grifters. But give Inhofe and Coburn twenty minutes, they’ll probably think of something.

[ Salon ]