Tom Coburn, King of the Tortured Metaphor
Tom Coburn, King of the Tortured Metaphor
The wit and wisdom of Senator Tom Coburn, courtesy GQ.
* "And it's kind of like holding a pet bird. If you hold it too tight, you'll kill it. And if you hold on to office too tight, you'll kill our republic."
* On Newt Gingrich: "...like a whipped dog who still barked, yet cowered, in Clinton's presence."
* "Also Robert Byrd -- he knows exactly how to rape the U.S. Treasury and mortgage the future."
* "When you're delivering a baby," he said, "and the baby's getting in trouble, and you can see the baby's heartbeat, which is normally about 130 or 140 beats per minute, going down to fifty or sixty, and you're standing there watching it go down, you know you've got about three minutes to make a decision. You can use a pair of forceps and try to pull it out, you can use a vacuum extractor, or you can leave labor and delivery, put her on the table, put her to sleep, cut a hole in her belly, and take it out with a C-section -- but you've got to do something, and you've got to do it now. That baby's life depends on what you do in those three minutes. And that's exactly where we are in our country today. We are in those critical three minutes. If we wait to act, it's going to be too late. We're going to lose the baby."
Make up your own Coburnalogy in the comments! We'll start you off: how is being in the Senate like dying of cancer? Or: what deviant criminal act is the defense-appropriations subcommittee performing on the American people every day? The more morbid the better!