The Bell Tolls For Tom Coburn

Yes, the bell eventually tolls for everyone as we all know, but these days it feels like it never stops. In fact in this the year of our Lord 2020, it is easy to think in many locales there will soon be platoons of ominous figures dressed in hooded robes roaming the streets calling for us to, "Bring out the dead."

Today we found out that among the recently deceased is former U.S. Senator Tom Coburn. COVID-19 didn't get him, but rather it was the cancer he had been battling since 2013. It was the same cancer which caused him to resign from the senate in 2015.

Tom Coburn was raised in my old home town, Muskogee, Oklahoma. He was the scion of what might be considered local royalty. His father, Orin was an optician and the founder of Coburn Optical Industries. Later the old man would give Oral Roberts University enough cash that Roberts named the institute's short lived law school after him. Earlier, on a much smaller scale, he sponsored the first Little League baseball team I played on. We were called the, Coburn Rockets.

Tom hit the House of Representatives in 1995. To say he was right wing is an understatement. Before he was done he would do battle with House Speaker, Newt Gingrich because he thought Gingrich was leading the GOP too far to the left.

Yeah. Let that sink in for a few seconds.

The first time the Congressman made national news was in 1997. When NBC decided to air the movie, "Schindler's List," uncut he threw a hissy fit. He claimed the film, which is a devastating tale about the Holocaust, was unfit to be put on network TV. He used as his excuse a scene which showed nude female prisoners being herded into a concentration camp shower room.

Others weren't so sure that was his true motive. Years later when he was in the Senate he deepened this lingering suspicion when he inexplicably sat on the  judicial nomination of Robert Bacharach. Bacharach, who is Jewish, had already gotten the go ahead from Oklahoma Senator, Jim Inhofe. Coburn initially claimed he was waiting on the Senate Judicial Committee to vet Bacharach. Committee chair, Patrick Leahy, however, claimed that was bullshit. He pointed out that Senate rules mandated the committee couldn't start its vetting process until both Coburn and Inhofe gave their okay.

In both instances Tom Coburn--a fervent Southern Baptist--ended up frantically doing the political two step in order to get out of the way of public outrage and ugly, but valid questions about his attitude toward Jews.

Beyond the questions of anti Semitism  Coburn's politics were so extreme they sometimes landed in that nether region where the far right meets the ultra left. Current presidential candidate Bernie Sanders likes to brag about how he voted against funding the war in Iraq. One of his few allies in that endeavor was Tom Coburn. Later he was quoted as saying, "I will tell you personally that I think it was probably a mistake going to Iraq."

Locally he stepped into serious trouble twice. Once the largest paper in the state, The Oklahoman, ran a photo of him hugging Barack Obama--they had entered the Senate at the same time a few years earlier and become friends during orientation for freshman. The image drove the people we'd eventually come to call MAGAS utterly berserk. The second, after the Newtown, CT massacre of first graders and teachers, he switched his position on universal background checks for gun purchases. The NRA and its supporters were immediately enraged enough to promise they'd defeat him when he ran for re-election. They had a problem though. Coburn had already announced he was retiring.

Conservative pundit and activist, Bill Kristol claims he tried to recruit the former Senator to run for President as an independent in 2016. The idea was to promote a, "principled and moral," conservative as an alternative to Donald Trump. According to Kristol, Coburn considered it briefly before deciding his health was declining too quickly.

If true that would have been a three way race for the ages. Although he wouldn't have won the odds are he would have cost Trump the White House. Alas, we can only dream of what might have been.

Tom Coburn repeatedly voted against bills which would aid people with disabilities and he was vehemently anti gay rights. He said he was in favor of a limited federal government, yet he thought it was proper for that government to interfere in women's health issues.

In the end, however, when interviewed by The Oklahoman after it ran that chummy photo of him and Obama he said, "You need to separate the difference in political philosophy versus friendship. How better to influence somebody than love them?"

I didn't know Tom Coburn--I certainly didn't like his politics--but those words alone are enough to make me respect him in this petty and savage age of Donald Trump.

Yep, that's how bad it is.



sic vita est


3-28-20