On the Right Side?

Jim Inhofe is a lot of things -- businessman, aviator and senator -- but he's no movie critic.

That said, he still thinks he knows a movie when he sees one. That's why he bristles when he hears An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's film on the dangers of global warming, referred to as a documentary.

As Tulsans know and the nation has learned over the past year or so, Inhofe has strong views about global warming -- which he calls "a lie". He also has strong opinions about Gore, whom he feels is trying to scare the populace into electing him as the next president by railing on about the possibility of climate-controlled catastrophes.

"That's not a documentary," growls Inhofe in reference to An Inconvenient Truth, "that's a movie."

The truth according to Inhofe can be unnerving to some. The senior senator from Oklahoma is known as one of the most -- if not the most -- conservative members of Congress. He's held his current office since 1994, when he was part of the Republican wave which took over both the Senate and the House of Representatives, a voter mandate viewed by many as a backlash against the Clinton administration. While Inhofe's views chafe many and hardly seem to be dictated by poll numbers, he doesn't seem shy about espousing them.

Inhofe agrees with President Bush's widely unpopular plan to send more troops into Iraq and thinks history will ultimately show that the move to go to war in the first place was the right one.

"Weapons of mass destruction never should have been an issue," says Inhofe. "Everyone knew Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He used them.

"But the major reason that this had to happen with Iraq is that three of the major terrorist training camps were in Iraq."

As one of the senior members of the Committee on Armed Services, Inhofe has made a dozen trips to Iraq. When reviewing the war on terrorism, he cites enemy cells that can be found not just in Iraq, but in Iran, Syria, the Philippines and Africa as well.

Inhofe has no interest in seeing the U.S. pull out of Iraq. As a simple explanation, he quotes Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona), the only member of the Committee on Armed Services with more seniority than he has.

"We have to go where they are," says Inhofe, echoing his colleague, "or they'll follow us home."

For Inhofe, Tulsa is home. For the holidays, he gathered in the area with his wife of 47 years, Kay, and their children and grandkids. Inhofe never likes to be away from the Sooner State for too long. While working in Washington, D.C., he often commutes home on the weekends.

Inhofe grew up in Tulsa and served as the city's mayor from 1978-84.

"As an example, he used to talk about the Nowata Dam," recalls Inhofe, "the largest, totally privately built public project in America."

Inhofe still has plenty of interest in Tulsa. He has followed some of the debates about developing in and around the Arkansas River. But if the development is going to get done, Inhofe would like to see taxpayers avoid the lion's share of the burden. During his mayoral tenure, he seldom had to answer to anyone -- and seldom did. He liked to broker the best deal possible and then move forward.

"The criticism I have of all mayors -- Republican and Democrat -- is that they've lost the power of the private sector," he says. "We're just getting more of the same. If you want to have something, you have to have a tax increase or a bond issue.

"That's the mentality that Tulsa has to get out of. And I don't see it happening. It hasn't happened since I've been mayor."

Now 72, Inhofe began his political career in the late 1960s. He served in the Oklahoma House of Representatives from 1967-69 before moving on to the state Senate, where he was in office from 1969-77. In the midst of his time in the Oklahoma Senate, he ran for governor in 1974, but lost to the Democratic nominee, David Boren, who would later inadvertently help to launch Inhofe's political career to new heights.

Though he had failed in a bid for Congress 10 years earlier, Inhofe gave it another shot in 1986 and was elected. He was still a member of the House of Representatives in 1994 when Boren announced he was leaving the U.S. Senate to become the president of the University of Oklahoma. As the Republican nominee in the special election for the vacated Senate seat, Inhofe rolled to victory.

With Bush's approval rating languishing in the mid-30 percentile, Inhofe claims a unique view of the president. While he says he had more in common politically with Reagan and the senior Bush, he doesn't necessarily think history will be a harsh critic of "Dubya."

Years from now, he feels Bush's decision to go into Iraq will be viewed as a "no-brainer," something that had to be done. What will define Bush's legacy, in Inhofe's opinion, are his appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court -- Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, a pair of conservatives.

"Almost every bad, liberal interpretation or decision that was rendered from the Supreme Court was done on a 5-4 decision," says Inhofe. "He's going to have a profound impact on history.

"History will remember President Bush as the one who cleaned up the United States Supreme Court."

Liberal decisions -- and people -- seldom get love from Inhofe. He can be found sitting on the opposite side of nearly all of their causes, including gay rights, abortion and, of course, global warming. Inhofe blames many of Bush's problems on what he dubs the "very, very liberal" media, supposedly wasting no opportunity to attack the president.

Inhofe has a cameo in "An Inconvenient Truth," painted as a high-ranking government official who just doesn't get it when it comes to the man-made problems plaguing Mother Earth. But Inhofe isn't about to back down from a fight, regardless of how heavily the odds may seem stacked against him.

Global warming, he says, really isn't about global warming. It's about stifling progress in the U.S. and causing job flight to other countries.

"The extreme environmentalist community wants to stop all development and all coal-fire generating plants," says Inhofe. "How do you do that? You do it by stopping carbon dioxide."

Coal-fire generating plants produce energy, which can be used in a myriad of ways. But according to many in the scientific community, they create "greenhouse gasses" as well, carbon dioxide and methane, which are slowly warming the planet and changing the climate. The effects, they say, could be dire.

"There is not one coal-fire generating plant in the entire state of California," says Inhofe. "The Chinese are building three new coal-fire generating plants a day. So, if we did anything like putting caps on carbon dioxide, it would mean to get a job you would have to go to where they have energy -- to the developing nations."

Inhofe quotes facts and figures which back up his argument -- that carbon dioxide and methane gases are not causing climate change. Meanwhile, there's no shortage of evidence to the contrary.

The truth -- according to Inhofe and seemingly convenient to those in the business world -- will eventually shine through.

"The majority of the scientific evidence is now on my side of this issue," he says. "The media is not going to buy it yet, but they will."