A few months ago I came to the conclusion that James Inhofe (R-OK) is the worst senator out there. Worse than Trent Lott. Worse than Rick Santorum. This is a guy who called the EPA a "Gestapo beaurocracy" and thinks that 9-11 was God's punishment on us for not surporting Israel enough. As for global warming? Inhofe calls it "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people".

Now this, via Josh Marshall. At a Senate hearing probing the prison abuse at Abu Ghraib, Inhofe thought it would be a good idea to say the following:

"I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment,"

"These prisoners, you know they're not there for traffic violations," Inhofe said. "If they're in cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands and here we're so concerned about the treatment of those individuals."

"I am also outraged that we have so many humanitarian do-gooders right now crawling all over these prisons looking for human rights violations, while our troops, our heroes are fighting and dying.

As I pointed out in my previous post, a lot of these insurgents are total scoundrels who are capable of far worse deeds than their American captors. But that's not even close to being a good reason for downplaying what our prison guards did. What's more, Inhofe made those remarks this morning, after the Red Cross reported that military intelligence officers estimated up to 90% of the detainees were arrested by mistake. These people aren't mostly murderers and terrorists. They're mostly innocent bystanders who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Rumor has it that John McCain walked out of the hearings when Inhofe made the remarks. Good for him. Inhofe sucks, and he's the worst senator in office.