Oklahoma’s Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe’s retirement announcement was met by most people around here with a great deal of joy. Inhofe was a terrible senator with a terrible record. Maybe the only worthwhile highlight from Inhofe’s career was his pulling out a snowball on the Senate floor in some bizarre attempt to prove that climate change was not real.
One of his many hack-conservative positions was voting against a series of COVID-19 pandemic aid packages, including the Families First Coronavirus Response in March 2020. The bill was the least our elected officials could do—the least, and Sen. Jim Inhofe couldn’t even do that. This vote came toward the end of his terrifying reign, which ended abruptly when reports came out in February 2022 that he would be resigning from his position.
About a year after his retirement, Inhofe decided to do a little interview with the Tulsa World, where he admitted that the real reason he retired was due to continuing long-term COVID-19 effects. But there’s more.
According to Inhofe, “Five or six others have (long COVID), but I’m the only one who admits it.” Whatever Inhofe means in the grand scheme of things, this is a far more believable statement than his stances and statements as a climate science-denier “numbskull.”
And as HuffPost reports, Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine has been pretty open about dealing with the lasting ill effects of COVID-19. Meanwhile, even when he’s bragging about what a dunderhead hypocrite he is, Jim Inhofe is sort of a liar.
Part of what makes this news is that in February 2022, when he announced his retirement, Sen. Inhofe claimed that he had just tested positive for “a very mild case” of COVID-19. But if he had just gotten a mild case of COVID-19, how would he have long-term effects? Clearly, that “very mild case” was either the long-term effect surfacing, or a new case, or a case from the past that he was pretending was happening now that he was announcing his retirement.
During an interview with the Tulsa World back in March 2020, when Inhofe was making sure he didn’t vote to help Americans via coronavirus legislation, he did say he believed in the virus being real. For a man that doesn’t believe in climate change, it was something. Of course, with little known about the COVID-19 virus, Inhofe was pretty sure it wasn’t worth getting all protect-y about.
“I try to be careful, but I have to be reminded to do things like wash my hands. I have to do things I’m not used to and that’s difficult sometimes.”
[...]
“A woman came for a meeting this morning, and without thinking, I came out from behind my desk to shake hands,” said Inhofe. “She practically ran away from me.”
Is that a true story? Probably not. I mean, I doubt Jim Inhofe ever remembered to wash his hands even before a pandemic made it a front-of-the-mind kind of activity. What Inhofe’s long-term COVID effects are, he did not expound upon. The rest of the interview is about how he likes to hang around planes and how he’s really powerful in Oklahoma politics, even though he’s never been a particularly popular person (compared to other conservative politicians in the Sooner State). The answer to that latter question, not covered in the Tulsa World piece, is oil money.
I’d say good luck and listen to your doctors, but Jim Inhofe will do what he’s always done: what the money tells him to do.
Posted with permission from Daily Kos
