“Our Ol’ Buddy Jim” Is (Partly) Right!

(The quote in the title refers to the greeting he receives whenever he appears on Faux News.)

I bet you thought you’d never see the day when I actually give Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma credit for anything, right?

Well, he gave a ranting speech the other day saying that U.N. peacekeepers “have been teaching young girls to be prostitutes.”

(And by the way, I love his defense of the $320 million "Bridge to Nowhere" in Alaska - which even the other senator from that notorious red state, Tom Coburn, opposed - saying the money would have still gone to Alaska anyway instead of to Louisiana or a Gulf state for reconstruction because of damage related to Katrina. Do we need more of a testimonal for the Repugs' horrible fiscal mismanagement?)

Unfortunately, he’s right to a point about the prostitution (and believe me when I tell you that I don’t like to admit that).

However, far be it for Inhofe to mention that the U.N. and UNICEF have set up a commission to investigate child exploitation, right? After all, that would mean actually giving the U.N. credit for something, and we simply cannot have that, now can we?

As noted in the story…

To highlight the existence of the most egregious violations of international human rights law and encourage Governments to investigate particular cases, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights has appointed a Special Rapporteur on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography. The Special Rapporteur, an expert in the field, works to gather and analyse facts for the Commission.

The condition most common to children who suffer, or are deprived of, opportunity is the poverty resulting from economic injustice. "The most perverse form of denial of child rights is poverty, because poverty makes it impossible to satisfy those needs that are basic rights", says Tereza Albenez, Special Advisor to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) on the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Also...

But the more direct injustices perpetrated largely by adults -- and manifested in the large numbers of children exploited as labourers and prostitutes or maimed by war -- require further public exposure and protective laws that are actually enforced.

In the last decade, an estimated two million children have been killed in armed conflict, many of them by some of the 100 million landmines thought to be concealed in 62 countries. A total of perhaps four to five million more have been disabled as a result of their experience in war, and more than 12 million have been made homeless.

As for child labour, while experts agree that there are few accurate statistics available, the best estimates from the ILO are that there are nearly 80 million children under 15 working as labourers. It is also estimated that the number of children under 18 involved in prostitution exceeds two million, one million of whom are in Asia and 300,000 in the United States.

I have an idea, Jim. Why don’t you try investigating family and child protection service agencies in Oklahoma (assuming you have any) and make sure these agencies are staffed and funded properly so that your own constituents are provided for instead of shooting off your big mouth and attacking something about which you know very little, thus showing yourself to the whole world as the idiot that you truly are?