Search for Jim Inhofe on Google, and you’ll immediately see pictures of the Republican senator from Oklahoma proudly holding a snowball on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
Inhofe’s career in elected office spans nearly six decades, but the snowball is perhaps his most famous stunt — one of pure, unabashed climate idiocy that will follow him long after he vacates his senate seat.
Inhofe, 87, will retire in early January after nearly three decades in the Senate. He leaves behind a legacy of climate denial that might be laughable if it weren’t so embarrassing and dangerous. There are few members of Congress who have done more to sow public doubt about the mounting, deadly impacts of fossil fuel-driven planetary warming, or to block policies and regulations meant to confront the threat.
Inhofe’s views go far beyond skepticism about the magnitude of the global threat. He’s dismissed global warming as “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” and called for climate scientists to be criminally prosecuted. He’s accused the Environmental Protection Agency of “brainwashing our kids” with “propaganda” about climate change. And he’s characterized carbon dioxide — the main driver of planetary warming — as nothing more than “a form of fertilizer to grow things.”
That "Senator Snowball" is removing his carcass from the Senate, where he was the most faithful servant of the fossil fuel industry, is the good news. The bad news is that he's being replaced by another MAGA clown equally beholden to the same climate- change- denying industry, because Oklahoma is a deep red, drill baby drill state and that's what they do (see "The ugly," below). Speaking of the climate ...
There are many possible explanations for why the GOP is going so dark, most of which revolve around the fact that the party's authoritarian base voters and its big-money donors have a lot more influence than potentially winnable independent voters do. But the unnecessary, gratuitous viciousness of so much of this stuff — seriously, no one asked Ron DeSantis to relitigate the pandemic! — makes that kind of bloodless explanation seem unsatisfying. It's time to ask a different question: Is it possible that GOP leadership is composed of the same unhinged sadists as their voting base?
In rational terms, it doesn't make a ton of sense for Republican leaders to lean even harder into MAGA nonsense. Both Abbott and DeSantis won re-election easily, but the overall trend-lines suggest that most voters are grossed out by overt cruelty. As David Graham at the Atlantic wrote last month, cumulative polling data suggests "the emergence of a big anti-MAGA coalition that started in the 2018 midterm."
That's exactly what is driving much of this GOP ugliness, I would argue. It's an angry reaction to the growing realization that most Americans think they're nuts. It's not rational at all — it's just vengeful. Since at least the days Ronald Reagan, Republicans have embraced the idea that they're the rightful rulers of the U.S., and that any Democratic win is a fluke or the result of some kind of cheating. (As Heather Digby Parton has repeatedly pointed out in Salon, Trump's Big Lie is just an expansion of the long Republican history of seeing any and all electoral defeats as proof of "voter fraud" conspiracy theories.) That sense of entitlement, however, is running headlong into a mountain of evidence that most Americans flat-out don't like Republicans and don't agree with their views...
It's all about the privileged entitlement that, as Marcotte describes in the piece, is driving the raw Republican ugliness we see every day everywhere. They've convinced themselves, from the toxic males and their penis compensators to the election- denying careerists in and outside elective office, that they are the "rightful rulers of America." If it weren't so existentially dangerous, it would be laughable.
