Coburn Tells Truth… Will Not Receive Invites to Christmas Parties

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Audio and Transcript – Senator Tom Cuburn was on This Week with George Stephanopoulos yesterday and intimated that he was ready to accept a tax increase if Dumbocrats would put entitlements on the table.  Without putting Medicare out there — for those of you that think that the federal edifice can be preserved, which I have begun the process of thinking that is less and less likely.  If you’re not going to either terminate or seriously reconfigure Social Security and Medicare — which consume about two-thirds of every nickel the federal government has to borrow — if you’re not going to seriously reconfigure those two things and tell people they’re just going to have to freaking deal with it, grow up, put a helmet on, life stinks, deal with it, your federal edifice is not going to survive. Check out the rest in today’s audio and transcript…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Boehner and Obama meet in private to discuss the fiscal cliff.  Coburn, the senator from Oklahoma who last time he was on this show discovered that there was a person named the King Dude.  Remember that?  You remember Coburn [mocking] “I didn’t know you were the King Dude.”  I fondly remember that.  Senator Coburn was promoting his book The Debt Bomb.  He was on the program.  Coburn is a good guy.  He’s one of these gentlemen in the Senate that doesn’t vote with Mitch McConnell and the rest of the establishment boys all the time.  I think he actually cares about our fiduciary impending meltdown.

He was on This Week with George Stephanopoulos yesterday and intimated that he was ready to accept a tax increase if Dumbocrats would put entitlements on the table.  Without putting Medicare out there — for those of you that think that the federal edifice can be preserved, which I have begun the process of thinking that is less and less likely.  If you’re not going to either terminate or seriously reconfigure Social Security and Medicare — which consume about two-thirds of every nickel the federal government has to borrow — if you’re not going to seriously reconfigure those two things and tell people they’re just going to have to freaking deal with it, grow up, put a helmet on, life stinks, deal with it, your federal edifice is not going to survive.  Here’s the first digital media file, Coburn on with George Stephanopoulos yesterday.

[start audio clip]

Senator Coburn: Medicare and Social Security and Medicaid, if those aren’t fixed, if we’re not honest about how to fix them, and the fact that yes, everybody in this country will have to participate in some discomfort if we’re going to get out of this hole, as long as we continue to lie to the American people that you can solve this problem without adjusting and working on those programs, it is dishonest and beneath anybody in Washington.

[end audio clip]

Mike:  Did you hear that?  He just said exactly what I said.  AG, confirm to the audience that you did not play that clip for me in show prep.  I did not hear it.

AG:  We did not, no.

Mike:  I have the headline here but I had not heard it.  I am impressed.  Play it again, Sam.  Let me get my Humphrey Bogart on here.

[start audio clip]

Senator Coburn: Medicare and Social Security and Medicaid, if those aren’t fixed, if we’re not honest about how to fix them and the fact that yes, everybody in this country will have to participate in some discomfort if we’re going to get out of this hole, as long as we continue to lie to the American people that you can solve this problem without adjusting and working on those programs, it is dishonest and beneath anybody in Washington.

[end audio clip]

Mike:  He’s calling his colleagues out, “as long as you continue to lie.”  Where’s Ric Flair when you need him?  Whoo!  That was Tom Coburn from the top turnbuckle with an elbow to the head of Boehner, Reed and McConnell.  What would you call that wrestling move?  Is there a name from one of the vaults from the top rope?  I think it used to be the — who used to do that back in the day when I was a wrestling fan?  You know when you jump from the top rope and hit the dude in the head with the back of your elbow, or you go across him and put him in a headlock on the way down and put him in a sleeper hold?  What do you call that move?

AG:  The Macho Man had a flying elbow drop.

Mike:  That was a flying elbow drop right there.  Here’s the question, class.  Is he correct?  The answer is of course he’s correct.  What then?  What is the possibility that something like what Coburn just suggested is actually going to happen?  What is the possibility that those that are in the employ and pay of all the rest of us in Mordor on the Potomac River are actually going to have to tell the truth?  This would be a great game show, wouldn’t it?  Who hosted Truth or Consequences?  That wasn’t Bob Barker was it?

To get Reed and company and the Dumbocrats to the table, Coburn says, number one, political games have to end.  It seems to me, Andrew, that Senator Coburn is one of those gentlemen that is probably not cut out to be a United States senator.   He’s a doctor by trade.  He’s like Dr. Paul.  He is not quite as libertarian as Paul, but he is definitely a critically thinking doctor.  Of course, if you’re a medical doctor, you almost have to be a critical thinker.  You can’t just say, “I think it’s this.”  By process of evidence and then elimination, you have to try to diagnose what it is that a patient has.  He seems to me, though, to be one of these gentlemen that doesn’t fit the politician mode.  He’s there and he’s trying to be a politician, but when he lets one slip like “we can’t keep lying about this,” do you think he’s going to get invited to a cocktail party this week?

AG:  I’d love to agree with you, but then what did we see last week?  What did we see last week with someone who I also thought might not be a lifelong Washingtonian political insider?

Mike:  Oh, yes, Senator DeMint.

AG:  A little jaded I would say I have been over the last 72 hours or so with what’s happened politically.

Mike:  Welcome to my world.  I am amused by the excuse-making that “conservatives” are now making up for DeMint.  I’ve never seen anything like this.  It appears now, and I don’t know where I missed this in the founding era and years that came after, but it appears now that without the existence of think tanks, we all shall perish almost immediately from the face of the earth.  If we don’t have a Heritage Foundation out there micromanaging our participation in our own destructive, corrupt government, then heaven forefend, we all shall perish from the face of the earth.  Those people that are saying, [mocking] “This moves Heritage in the right direction,” to do what?  It moves Heritage in the right direction to do what?  What are they moving towards doing?  They don’t have a vote in the United States Senate.  They don’t have a vote in the House of Representin’.  They’re not a PAC as far as I know unless they just recently formed one.  What are they doing?

End Mike Church Show Transcript