Republican Senator James Inhofe in a rare GOP appearance on The Rachel Maddow Show, last night labeled as “hysterical” international concern over the Uganda “Kill The Gays” bill, while claiming he has never even heard of the three-year old bill and claiming he has never heard of the bill’s sponsor, MP David Bahati, one of the most powerful and the best-known Ugandan lawmakers. Senator Inhofe boasts that he has traveled to Africa, and primarily, to Uganda, almost two dozen times, and met with lawmakers and religious leaders there. A well-respected investigative journalist and popular author who has written two books on the topic says Inhofe is “lying.”
Rachel Maddow, in one segment of her extensive interview with the man who claims no one in his family has ever been divorced or gay, asks, now “that the Kill The Gays bill is back now, are you for it or against it?”
Watch the video of Rachel Maddow’s interview with Senator Inhofe:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640
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Senator Inhofe, in a rather theatrical twist of emotion, responds with this diatribe:
Are you saying, are you suggesting, Rachel — I want to make sure everyone understands this — that I am for executing gays, that I somehow knew something about what their philosophy is over there and what they’re doing legislatively? I know Uganda , I know Ethiopia, I know Ghana, I know Benin, I know Africa better than anyone else certainly in the United States Senate. I’ve spent a lot of time over there, I’ve developed close relations over there. When 9/11 happened, I was the only member of the Armed Services Committee who knew where Africa was. We were making a decision to get into Africa to help train them to resist all the things coming into the state, into the country, into the continent. That’s what I did. So I do know Africa well.
It is not possible for these two statements to co-exist. If Senator Inhofe knows Africa well, then he knows David Bahati — and knows about the Uganda Kill The Gays bill — very well. Frankly, millions of Americans know about David Bahati and his Kill The Gays bill, so if Senator Inhofe doesn’t — after spending hundreds of thousands of you tax dollars on trips to Africa and Uganda, then something is desperately wrong and we should immediately stop paying for these excursions.
There is no possible way to deny this, and I all but guarantee that anyone feeling like doing a bit of FOIA research could easily prove it.
In fact, the one person best able to prove it might very well be journalist Jeff Sharlet, author of the groundbreaking book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. No other American journalist knows Inhofe better than Sharlet.
So, what does Sharlet say?
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