At a recent townhall meeting, Rep. James Lankford (R-OK), an oil-funded freshman, dismissed the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico as the equivalent of a “health code violation” at a local restaurant. He criticized the now-ended six-month hiatus on offshore drilling permits as an overblown reaction to the BP spill:
Our reaction to the gulf coast spill would be like closing every restaurant in Shaw-nee because one restaurant had a health code violation.
Lankford’s analogy might be apt if the “health code violation” involved a deadly outbreak of Ebola or mad cow disease that killed 11 eleven people, caused in part by industry contractors that supply every single restaurant, with lax government regulators complicit in an epidemic that took months to overcome, leaving the entire region permanently scarred.
Lankford has already raked in $119,960 in contributions from the oil and gas industry, including $10,000 from Koch Industries.