Month 2, Day 17: More Hatin’ on Inhofe

Continuing with the “97” theme for today’s letter, which will go off to the Boston Globe.

This one is a pretty standard unfurling of my general talking points. I’m trying to have one or two genuinely creative letters a week, with the rest being permutations and combinations of the themes I’m recycling. Since yesterday’s letter went to Inhofe’s flunkies, I figured I’d go on dumping on him for another day or so.

By now it’s utterly predictable: more snow will bring Republican climate-change “skeptics” out in full force. Sure enough, James Inhofe has built an igloo in front of the U.S. Capitol with a sign on it mocking Al Gore. Since Washington is the only place in the world that counts, Inhofe doesn’t care that the Winter Olympics had to import snow, or that temperatures elsewhere in the world are at record highs. The Oklahoma Republican refuses to admit the existence of a slowly unfolding disaster that will dwarf any crisis humanity has ever confronted. If ninety-seven out of a hundred inspectors called a restaurant unsanitary, you’d be crazy to eat there. If ninety-seven out of a hundred counter-terrorism experts told you that Al-Qaeda was planning a major operation, you’d be crazy not to take it seriously. But if ninety-seven percent of climatologists say that global warming is a real and present danger, they are mocked and derided by G.O.P. denialists. Our grandchildren will not be kind to the memory of Senator Inhofe and his ilk.

Warren Senders