No, I’m not done talking about Sen. John Inhofe (R-Okla.). I read the full transcript of yesterday’s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing and it’s even worse than I had first imagined.
Maybe Inhofe heard that Sen. Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum had taken the lead in the race for “The Senator The Left Hates Most” contest and decided to re-stake his claim for the title. Frankly, there’s no other explanation for yesterday’s performance.
Well, maybe there’s one other explanation: He’s stark raving mad.
I read a few days ago that conservatives were going to “go on the offensive” on the Abu Ghraib scandal, but hadn’t a clue what that could possibly mean. If the White House was expressing disgust over the abuse, while Democrats, our international allies, and nearly all of the mainstream press were characterizing this devastating story with equal revulsion, then who, exactly, could conservatives go after as part of this new campaign “offensive”?
Initially, the Rush Limbaughs of the world rolled out the first stage of this offensive: this scandal is meaningless because the torture was a harmless prank. This was clearly misguided from the start and clashed terribly with the White House message. Limbaugh stuck to his foolish guns, but only a few of his ideological cohorts jumped the cliff with him.
The next phase was a half-hearted offensive to blame policies that allow women in the military. This was completely nonsensical, even by conservative standards. It ignored the fact that prisoners of war had been tortured long before a woman ever wore a uniform, but more importantly, it failed to make any kind of coherent connection between the two. Why would fraternization between soldiers of different genders lead to systematic torture? The conservatives never really said.
There was even a mild conservative offensive launched by Joe Lieberman, who managed to somehow argue that the abuse scandal shouldn’t generate an apology because the terrorists didn’t apologize for 9/11, or something. The bad guys are bad, so we’re only sort of bad…I never really grasped what Lieberman’s point was. Regardless, it didn’t make any sense, Lieberman looked like a fool, and it was quickly dropped as a line of attack.
Yesterday, the conservatives’ offensive took on a whole new form. It finally had a message and a messenger. Inhofe was taking charge and if that meant looking like a lunatic, so be it.
I mentioned yesterday that Inhofe told the world that he is “more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment.” But Inhofe went far further. He outlined the new right-wing line of attack — the United States can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, to whomever it wants, and no one should question it.
To hear Inhofe tell it, Saddam was a monster, so what we did wasn’t so bad. Iraqis are suspected terrorists, so we can torture them with impunity. Dems want Rumsfeld to resign, so obviously this scandal has no meaning. Ambiguous ends justify any means.
In just a few minutes, Inhofe tore the mask off the conservative veneer and almost sounded glad that we were torturing those prisoners.
Inhofe made a passing reference to the “misguided” American abusers, but he saved his real anger for “humanitarian do-gooders,” the press, and the Kerry campaign. It was a twisted display.
What’s worse, Inhofe is apparently proud of himself and confident that the White House approved of his ranting invective.
At a time when the Bush administration has issued a series of apologies for the mistreatment of Iraqi captives, it might be easy to assume that Inhofe is consciously challenging the White House from its right flank. But the Oklahoma senator insists that he is stoutly supporting the administration and beleaguered Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Asked about his inflammatory opening statement to the committee, Inhofe said confidently, “I’m sure that the president was glad that I did it.”
Virtually every blog online has commentary on this, but I was particularly struck by Josh Marshall, who described Inhofe’s rambling tirade as one of the most “shameful spectacles” he’s ever seen in Congress.
America’s greatest moments in the last century came when she tempered power with right and toughened, or sharpened, the edges of right with power — World War II, then the post-war settlement that framed the Cold War are the clearest, though certainly not the only, examples.
But here you have Jim Inhofe lumbering out of his cave and on to the stage, arguing that we can do whatever we want because we’re America. Inhofe’s America is one that is glutted on pretension, cut free from all its moral ballast, and hungry to sit atop a world run only by violence. Lady Liberty gets left with fifty bucks, a sneer, a black eye, and the room to herself for the couple hours left before check out.