Inhofe: Obama Embraces ‘The Ones Who Want To Kill Us’

During his 17-year career, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) has held many unorthodox views: the rich, contrary to all available evidence, are not getting richer; Ivory Coast dictator Laurent Gbagbo’s brutal military forces lack weapons; global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated;” the media invented WMDs as an excusefor the invasion of Iraq; and so on.

Inhofe’s latest theory — that President Obama’s 2009 decision to shift missile defense from land to sea is evidence that Obama is “going out of his way to embrace … the ones who want to kill us” — is equally ridiculous. Here’s the exchange from his interview yesterday with Hugh Hewitt:

JI: And that was just trying to embrace that group of people. And I think his, one of his major concerns is what’s happening in Iran. Netanyahu is very familiar with what they are willing to do, what they are going to do. And yet, this administration, if you remember, he was the one who brought down the ground-based Interceptor that would have protected the United States and Western Europe from something coming from Iran. So it’s not just the lines that are drawn. It’s going out of his way to embrace that whole element.
HH: That radical Islamist element is what I think you’re talking about that is…
JI: Oh yeah. They’re the ones who want to kill us. I mean, you know, to think that they would even embrace the idea that they would have that element, with Hamas tied in with the Palestinians, Hamas who are doing everything they can to destroy Israel.

Inhofe’s words are both poorly timed and just plain wrong. Obama’s decision to scrap the Bush Administration’s European missile-defense program was shrewd, widely-praised and helped strengthen the U.S. relationship with Russia. Meanwhile, that Obama ordered the death of Osama bin Laden suggests that he doesn’t exactly embrace “the ones who want to kill us.”

In the same interview with Hewitt, Inhofe attacked Obama for his supposed aggression toward Israel. Inhofe told Hewitt that Obama must be mentally ill to have given his speech mentioning the 1967 Israeli-Palestinian border right before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit and the AIPAC dinner. Inhofe told Hewitt: “[Obama] has never been rejected in his life, and I think there’s something — I’m not qualified to diagnose him — but there’s something wrong with a guy that is going to go out of his way to do all these things right before these two events take place.”