Let’s Build a Special Hell on Earth for these Republican Officials errrr… Psychopaths

I read this link in the morning thread from BB and thought it was about the worst thing I had read for some time. It’s called the “Oklahoma Test” and it’s written by one of our blog favorites Charlie Pierce. It shows how absolutely vile some republican officials are these days.  Monsters.  Psychopaths.  A$$holes.  You choose the name. Today’s republicans are poster children for depravity.

Remember that Tom Coburn of Oklahoma is often cited as one of the Republicans with whom the president might be able to do business. He is a conservative, but not a crazy person, like his colleague, James Inhofe. He can be expected to listen respectfully to other points of view and to at least consider the virtues of the kind of compromises that take the Davids, Gregory and Gergen, to their respective happy places.

Then remember that, fundamentally, Tom Coburn is also a monster.

 “That’s always been his position [to offset disaster aid],” Coburn spokesman John Hart said. “He supported offsets to the bill funding the OKC bombing recovery effort.”  

This is a guy who, one day after a devastating natural disaster killed his own constituents, said he will not vote to alleviate their suffering unless he can inflict some pain on someone somewhere else in the country. And his spokesman defends this as a matter of principle, and uses the worst act of domestic terrorism in the history of the United States as a salutary example. (And the link demonstrates that Coburn’s aversion to tossing money down various ratholes is not universal.)  Does Senator Coburn really believe you can budget for the unthinkable? That tornadoes are zero-sum events? That you can horse-trade on human suffering as though it were a line-item on a transportation rider? I no longer am willing to try to understand how people like this think. They are monsters and they operate on their own monstrous imperatives.

I frequently find myself in disbelief at the depths of ignorance, selfishness, and utter disregard for human life and our country that makes up the minds of today’s Republicans.  That was Senator Coburn.  Now try the pretzeled psychosis that is the mental and moral state of Senator Jim Inhofe.

Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe (R) said on Tuesday that federal aid to tornado-ravaged parts of his home state will be “totally different” than a Hurricane Sandy aid bill he voted against late last year.

Speaking on MSNBC, the lawmaker said that in the case of Hurricane Sandy, “everybody was getting in and exploiting the tragedy that took place.” However, he said, “that won’t happen in Oklahoma.”

President Barack Obama on Tuesday said he has already signed a federal disaster declaration for parts of Oklahoma, where tornadoes have caused dozens of fatalities and flattened entire communities.

Inhofe said the Sandy Relief bill “was supposed to be in New Jersey,” but “they were getting things … in the Virgin Islands, fixing roads there, and putting roofs on houses in Washington, D.C.” Both Inhofe and Coburn voted to slash aid to victims of Hurricane Sandy, with Inhofe saying he considered the full proposed aid amount to be a “slush fund.”

While Northeastern states like New Jersey and New York suffered some of the worst damage from Hurricane Sandy, the storm affected 24 U.S. states in total during October of 2012. Sandy carved a destructive path from the Caribbean Sea to the Great Lakes, where it produced 25-foot waves in Lake Huron.

Hurricane Sandy is believed to have cost more than $50 billion, making it the second-costliest storm in U.S. history.

While it’s too early to estimate what the damage from the Oklahoma tornadoes might cost, in 1999 the state requested and received more than $67 million after a series of tornadoes.

I still live with the Hurricane Katrina aftermath.  I will never forget that money and help was doled out faster to Mississippi than Louisiana for pure political reasons.  They wanted to turn Louisiana red and bring down the governor a lot more than they wanted to help those of us that suffered from that huge horrible storm.  I felt the long shit-stained hand of Karl Rove in the treatment of our diaspora and especially of our middle class black population who voted solidly democrat and kept the state purple.

FEMA Director Michael Brown, who resigned over his handling of the response, later told a group of students that the White House only wanted to federalize the response in Louisiana, where the governor was a Democrat, and not in Republican-led Mississippi in order to embarrass Louisiana officials. Brown said the White House believed they had a chance to “rub [Kathleen Blanco’s] nose in it.”

Even my asshole Senator David Vitter came up with money for Sandy victims.  You can’t spend time in the wake of death and utter destruction and stay heartless.  Or can you?

For these two and many more of their ilk, it seems you can.

It seems that disasters in republican states are more deserving than disasters in democratic states.  It also seems that you can help your own by taking from the mouths of others.  Time and time again, we see the absolutely unhinged policies put forth by the Republican party.  We see them block the most reasonable national responses to national problems for unhinged, fanatical reasons usually based on myth, lies, and greed.   Of course we won’t leave Oklahoma in the dust and destruction.  But, it won’t be their elected officials that lend them real helping hands without taking from some of the rest of us.  C’mon Oklahoma … my birth state … how can you justify reelecting psychopaths like these?  How can you keep sending your country these monsters? Please, pen them up somewhere and build them a personal hell realm here on earth.