Jim Hightower

Here's an amazing fact: Oklahoma is the only state in the Union with a U.S. senator worse than its own far-out right-winger, Tom Coburn.

That would be Jim Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican extremist and dedicated nutballist who's further out than Pluto. For example, Inhofe is completely obsessed with the fantasy that global climate change is an elaborate hoax, perpetrated by a vast conspiracy of left-wing environmentalists, Democrats, non-Evangelical Christians, the media, and 99-percent of the world's climate scientists.

How does he know it's a hoax? Because the Bible tells him so! In a radio interview with an equally-conspiratorial outfit called Voice of Christian Youth America, this august United States Senator explained that the truth is right there in Genesis 8:22 "As long as the Earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat… will never cease."

In case that's too opaque for us infidels, Inhofe goes deeper: "My point is God's still up there." It's outrageous arrogance, spaketh the senator, "to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate."

Ironically, just days after Inhofe's insightful interview on radio KOOK, two new scientific analyses were published, documenting a relentless and fast-worsening rise in the Earth's sea levels due to the continued warming of our planet. As one of the co-authors of the scientific papers said, the devastating rise of the oceans is "building force while we do almost nothing."

Not to worry, though, for Inhofe assures us that climate change is a hoax, and even if it's not, it's God's work, not the fault of industrial polluters, so we should do nothing to stop them.

By the way, a scientific fact that Inhofe never mentions is that he has taken $1.3 million in campaign cash from Big Oil.