During the mad battle over health care reform, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) recently gave a speech on the Senate floor hoping that a senator would not make the vote. He encouraged prayer on the matter:
What the American people ought to pray is that somebody can’t make the vote tonight. That’s what they ought to pray.
Now some people thought the Senator he was implying about was 92-year-old ailing Robert Byrd (D- West Virginia). Coburn's comment got much criticism, including from Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois):
I have been trying to reach Sen. Coburn. … This statement troubles me, and I’m trying to reach him come back to the floor and explain exactly what he meant about a senator being unable to make the vote tonight. … I’m reaching out to Sen. Coburn. I’ll be on the floor for the next 45 minutes, and I hope that he will join me there.
As far as it is known, Coburn did not clarify what he meant by his statement.
In an interesting case of irony, when a vote did come up, a senator missed it - Republican James Inhofe.
And all of that led to this mindboggling, bizarre call to CSPAN from a teabagger who not only thought Sen. Inhofe was dead but that his prayer caused it.
Personally I prefer on-camera breakdowns to be done by either Joan Crawford or Maggie Smith.
Don't worry, by the way. Senator Inhofe is not dead - he just didn't make the vote.
But I don't know what's so weirder about this video - the fact that it reveals yet again the abject cluelessness of these teabaggers or the fact that both the CSPAN host and Senator John Barasso (R-Wyoming) kept a straight face throughout the entire thing:
Transcript:
CALLER: Yeah doctor. Our small tea bag group here in Waycross, we got our vigil together and took Dr. Coburn’s instructions and prayed real hard that Sen. Byrd would either die or couldn’t show up at the vote the other night.
How hard did you pray because I see one of our members was missing this morning. Did it backfire on us? One of our members died? How hard did you pray senator? Did you pray hard enough
HOST: Senator Barasso, he was referring to Senator Inhofe, who was not part of the round of voting this morning.
BARASSO: The votes today, they needed 60 votes in favor of the bill. Senator Inhofe is opposed to the bill, and whether he was there or not didn’t make any difference. There was no way that Jim Inhofe was going to vote for the bill, the senator from Oklahoma. So that’s why he wasn’t there this morning.
HOST: Do you know where he was, senator, why he wasn’t able to make the vote this morning?
BARASSO: No, I don’t know.
2 comments:
I think this was a leg-pull on the part of the caller, and a very effective and funny one. The right-wing kooks call themselves "tea party patriots" or some variant of that, not "tea bag" anything, not since some months ago when some conservative commentators clued them in on the alternate meaning of "tea bag."
if so, it's a very good joke. lol
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