Together in hypocrisy

As you behold the human loss and heartbreak in Oklahoma, you might ask yourself a question.

John Brummett is blogging daily online.

Can you conceive of any circumstance by which you would oppose federal disaster aid for those people?

I ask you as a reader and responsible citizen. But I also direct rhetorical queries to Oklahoma’s two Republican U.S. senators, Tom Coburn and James Inhofe.

I may as well invoke U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton, wonder-boy conservative Republican serving the southern half of Arkansas as a freshman congressman.

Is it too soon to risk seeming to exploit the Oklahoma tragedy for political point-scoring? Or is it never too soon to call out political inconsistency, or even hypocrisy?

Obviously I’ve settled on the latter.

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Let’s say there was special disaster-relief legislation in Congress to appropriate billions for the individuals, businesses and facilities damaged in and around Moore, Okla.

Let’s say the bill contained large sums of dollars beyond those needed for immediate aid. Let’s say there were proposed sums for “future mitigation” in such disasters.

Let us say, for example, that there was a provision appropriating money to study and develop more secure facilities and procedures for children in schools in tornado-prone areas.

And let us say that, yes, somebody somewhere sneaked some ancillary projects-pork, that is-into the bill, maybe for fisheries in Alaska or highways in Guam.

Would you tell Oklahomans no?

Would you so oppose spending for future mitigation against such disasters that you would vote against immediate aid for this one?

Would you so resent Guam or Alaska and political-pork practices in general that you would vote against a measure directing the bulk of aid to the undeniable, indeed compelling, Oklahoma need?

I would not. I fail to detect any difficulty in the question.

I would vote to send the money forthwith and work separately to reform the disaster-aid process, mainly to keep out unrelated pork.

I would not oppose additional money in the bill for future mitigation.

We need to learn lessons and apply them. Trying to making the next schoolhouse safer is not wasteful spending.

Sometimes people, through no fault of their own, encounter great human needs that, owing to their limitations and the magnitude of the problems, they can’t possibly meet by themselves.

So the solution is for all Americans to throw in together, both in private and public ways, and both in individual and collective ways-by which I mean as charitable individuals and associations and as a compassionate, responsive government.

Obviously, I’ve been headed in these paragraphs toward taking notice of this inconsistency, or hypocrisy: Coburn and Inhofe call for federal aid for their fellow Oklahomans even though both opposed the federal disaster-spending bill after Hurricane Sandy in the northeastern United States.

They were opposed for the very kinds of stated reasons laid out hypothetically earlier in this column.

Coburn, the less extreme, seeks to adhere to an abiding principle by saying he remains committed to finding spending cuts to offset new disaster-aid costs.

That’s fine-desirable, in fact-so long as meeting urgent human needs is not made actively contingent on … well, anything.

Inhofe, a more thorough Tea Party-type and less consequential as a senator, says the Oklahoma case is different from Jersey and Sandy.

He says Oklahoma aid will not be larded with spending neither immediate nor specifically related to actual compensation.

But how he can know that? How can he be assured no waste or inefficiency will occur?

Lacking that certainty, how can he reconcile his divergent advocacy, taking one form for Oklahoma and another for New Jersey, except that he lives in and represents one, but not the other?

So there is a future mitigating lesson to be learned.

It applies to our own Cotton, who opposed the Sandy bill and, owing to South Arkansas weather, could always find himself in the same pickle of inconsistency.

The future mitigating lesson is to advocate for others as one would advocate for oneself.

Cotton is the likely Republican challenger next year to U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor, who posted this innocuous little item on Twitter the other morning: “The devastation in [Oklahoma] underscores the need for Congress to continue to provide disaster relief for states in need.”

That would sound absurdly obvious, unless the guy likely to run against you didn’t seem to agree.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial, Pages 17 on 05/23/2013

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