FOX Gets Coburrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrned!

Well, well, well...it's a good thing he's on the wrong side:

The Fox News playbook calls for the promotion and evisceration of its critics. If the White House bad mouths the network, Glenn Beck adds a red phone to his set so its staff can call in. If LL Cool J objects to Sarah Palin rehashing an old interview of him for her show, a Fox spokesperson wishes Cool J "the best with his fledgling acting career," while bemoaning his lack of interest in inspiring others. It's hard to imagine what Bill O'Reilly would talk about if not for all the liberals and elites who regularly point out his network's failings.

So what is Fox News going to do with Tom Coburn, that upstanding conservative poster-senator from Oklahoma. Capitol News Connection has acquired audio of a recent Town Hall Coburn held in Oklahoma, in which the Senator, who is well-respected on both sides of the aisle, did not hide his disdain for the conservative info-tainment industry. After a woman said she did not want to go to jail for refusing health care, Coburn told her she was misinformed. “The intention is not to put any one in jail. That makes for good TV news on FOX but that isn't the intention,” Coburn responded.

“What we have to have is make sure we have a debate in this country so that you can see what's going on and make a determination yourself,” Coburn added and then again warned the crowd against the myths perpetrated on FOX News.

“So don't catch yourself being biased by FOX News that somebody is no good. The people in Washington are good. They just don't know what they don't know,” Coburn said.

He even had nice things to say about Nancy Pelosi, who has all but been equated to a devilish harpy hell-bent on emasculating every man and woman in the heartland.

 

Yes, apparently in the middle of America, even the women have dicks. At least the Republican ones, which would explain Larry Craig.

 

Coburn is showing enormous courage for a Republican. Goodness knows, the way they march in lockstep with each other, in ranks that would make a fascist tear up a little, makes dissent difficult. Just look at the way the Teabaggers jumped ugly on "RINOs" like Olympia Snowe when she voted HCR out of committee or Arlen Specter before he switched parties to avoid a primary against an avowed economic royalist with designs on scrapping the Smithian free market system nominally in place with a more Ferengi-oriented economic system, ethics and oversight be damned.

 

Coburn is an enormously respected conservative Senator from Oklahoma, who's enough of a crackpot to warn that healthcare reform will allow sex offenders to obtain Viagra (they can already), whose economics is questionably simplistic,  and who threw a temper tantrum to try to stop the Easter recess in the Senate for reasons that are wholly unclear.

 

In other words, he's one of them.

 

This would be similar to an Al Franken hissy fit about Air America Radio, to extend a hypothetical.

 

The Republican party has gone to great lengths in the past to keep its ducks in line, something we lefties can only marvel at. We're a fractious bunch and we are not afraid of dissension among the ranks if it helps us hammer out a solid policy that is palatable to independents without selling out too badly our principles.

 

Sometimes we even succeed and don't look like buffoons. Healthcare reform is one of those issues. When we're on, we're very hard to beat. When we are not on, we beat ourselves.

 

I often repeat a theory that the Republican party runs about thirty years behind the Democrats when it comes to party evolution. I think this is continuing: Obama is our Reagan, and the Republicans have now split into what amounts to the "Jesse Jackson Faction" (the hard left that back Ted Kennedy in 1980 in the primaries) and what became the Democratic Leadership Council, which eventually got Bill Clinton and Barack Obama elected (after the party reconsolidated under Bush's tyrannies).

 

The right, in other words, has a long way to go to heal. The "JJF" of the GOP is the Teabag faction. The ur-DLC are the RINOs, and it is the RINOs that will eventually win this fight. Coburn is merely choosing the winning side.