In the must-read category of news analysis: Rachel Tabachnick's careful deconstruction of Senator James Inhofe's lies evasions and obfuscations of the truth in his interview with Rachel Maddow regarding his connections to David Bahati, author of Uganda's kill the gays bill. Tabachnick is writing at Talk to Action.
As she notes, when Maddow interviewed Inhofe this week, she asked him about his connection to Bahati, and he replied,
Can you tell me who he is? I've never heard of him. ...I don't have any idea who you're talking about. ...Let's talk about something to do with global warming instead of getting off on these hysterical things.
But when Jeff Sharlett, author of The Family and C Street House, interviewed Bahati for Mother Jones in 2010, Bahati stated the following:
We know Senator Inhofe. We respect him.
Perhaps the meaning of the words "never" and "heard" and "him" has changed from 2010 to 2012, or perhaps they mean something different in Oklahoma, the state Inhofe represents in Congress, than they mean in other places in the world.
Because if the meaning of those words hasn't changed since 2010 and if you put what Inhofe has just told Maddow together with what Bahati himself said about Inhofe in 2010, there's no other conclusion to reach than that 1) Inhofe has had a serious lapse of memory, 2) ordinary words mean something different to Inhofe than they do to the rest of us, or 3) Inhofe is lying through his teeth.
And option #3 would be hard to imagine for a gentleman who, in the Sharlett article to which I link above, maintains he is all about promoting "the philosophy of Jesus" because he's a "scripturally based" political leader. (But I seem to recall some kind of commandment somewhere in the scriptures about not bearing false witness. And about letting one's yea be yea and one's nay be nay.)
P.S. don't overlook the sly dig of Inhofe's use of the gender-skewed term "hysteria" to slam Maddow.
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