Speaking of Dr. Tom Coburn: In a better world there'd be a way to screen morons and pathological liars out of public office

Does it matter whether Dr. Tom is a pathological
liar or is just too stupid to know better?

by Ken

This has no doubt been reported but just reached my attention via this item from Al Kamen in today's Washington Post "In the Loop" column:

Waterboarding for kids?

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) must be feeling stressed these days over the travails of his pal, Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.). For those who missed it, Coburn took to the Senate floor last week to decry federal deficits, which are not, for him, an abstraction.

"It is deeply personal with me," Coburn explained. "I have five grandchildren. I look in their eyes, and I see the potential of their lives and all of these other children who are out there. You know what? We are going to waterboard them. That is what we are going to do. We are going to waterboard them. We are going to flood them with debt. We are going to shackle their opportunities. We are going to limit their possibilities because we don't have the courage to make the difference for their future."

Wait a minute! It's just a dunk in the water.

The Constitution, of course, is notoriously sketchy about qualifications for the offices it established -- citizenship and age, and that's about it. And in the theoretical part of the brain, we all recognize that this is a good idea. The qualifications of candidates for public office should be judged by the voters, we always remind ourselves.

Then we witness spectacles like the 30 Republican senators dubbed "'rape-nuts" by Jon Stewart, who took that strong "conservative" stand in favor of government contractors' Right to Rape. Or the spectacle of that new darling of the Loony Right, microbrained SC Rep. Joe Wilson, not just lacking the basic sense of decency to control his flapping gums while the president is speaking, but perhaps more important lying his sociopathic guts out when he felt impelled to call the president a liar. (Once again, let's apply the "if the shoe were on the other foot" test and imagine what the Loony Right's reaction would have been had a Democrat done the exact same thing while the last president was speaking, and that was a creature who lied every time he opened his mouth, who has probably never intentionally told the truth in public in his adult life.)

And on and on. Here was Howie's take last month, "Teabaggery Isn't Just About South Carolina Republicans."

Now we have our good friend Dr. Tom Coburn achieving the special feat of annihilating reason on two urgent and seemingly unrelated issues, the economy and U.S. government practice of torture. Sometimes I think it might be nice if an orator in such circumstances might be required to declare whether he knows better, and thus speaks for the Party of Liars, or truly doesn't, and thus speaks for the Party of Morons. There have been times in our history when the press felt some responsibility for at least sorting out fact from fiction, but those times seem safely past.

So we still depend on this imperfect instrument of letting voters set their own standards. A certain number of the liars and morons have indeed been shown the door in the last two national elections, but not necessarily on that particular ground. And I'm afraid the evidence continues to indicate an alarmingly high level of tolerance for the Dr. Toms and Joe Wilsons.

Sigh.

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