What's the deal with James Inhofe (R-OK)????

Suffering from a bout of insomnia last night, I was clicking through the channels at about 2 a.m. and stumbled across CSPAN (or was id CSPAN-2? Who knows...) re-airing Al Gore's Senate testimony on Global Warming. As fate would have it, that conspiracy-mongering loon James 'Global Warming is an anti-captalistic hoax*' Inhofe was questioning Gore. I onkly caught the last few minutes of Inhofe's posturing and antics, but it really made my stomach turn to see how transparently dishonest and idiotic the man is. First, he rambles on about how 'thousands' of scientists disagree with Gore's claims, then asks Gore if he is right and all those scientists wrong (I only heard Inhofe mention 2 people, not thousands, but like I said, I tuned in late...). Gore then replies by naming off a few examples of the national and international scientific organizations that have made statements regarding global warming and so forth. Inhofe retorts - after whining about not having a lot of time and interrupting Gore while he was trying to answer - that Gore did not answer his question!
And in that few minutes that I saw, it just went downhill from there (as far as Inhofe's ranting goes).

I watched a few more exchanges, but largely saw party-line posturing (with some notable exceptions).

But I came away wondering if Inhofe is for real - it was as if he had memorized some sort fo right-wing script in whihc the replies are pre-ordained, regardless of the actual discussion at hand. The 'you didn't answer my question' after Gore did exactly that is a case in point. Who do people like Inhofe think they are fooling? Perhaps themselves?



*I was going to insert a link to documentation that Inhofe believes this. I know he does, he made some sort of speech at some right-wing organization a few months ago saying just that - but as I did a simple search for such documentation, I discovered that there are A LOT of people - right wing people - that have signed on to such a notion. This is just moronic nationalism. Not only do a bunch of conservatives fully believe this, many go on to demonize whom they refer to as "so-called researchers" or "so called scientists" as money-grubbing liars and incompetents. I wonder if these folks but into 'Intelligent Design'?