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crossposted on Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters
Every now and then, a situation takes that place that's so strange, it diverts my attention away from focusing on the religious right.
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.
11 Comments
God has bad aim – it’s clearly documentedFrom Katrina missing both the area and the timeframe when all the nasty homos were going to show up for Southern Decadence and whacking the church district, to Gomorrah… I mean San Francisco steadfastly refusing to fall into the ocean, etc, etc, etc, there’s way too much evidence that asking God for these things just doesn’t work out as planned.
But what the hell kind of person can actually think, much less call in to a show “I prayed real hard for him to die and he still showed up, did it backfire?”
The scariest thing is that it is such a tiny, tiny step from “praying real hard for God to kill him” to deciding that what God really wants is for someone to do it for him.
a christian prays for another human to die.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.
the better answer would’ve been “maybe you killed him”.
their black magic spells backfire, what a hoot.
the conjuring should be left to us godless heathens.
thank you very much.
This sounds like someone was pulling Sen. Barrasso’s legI think he was punk’d. Just because someone has a Southern accent doesn’t mean they’re a right-wing kook or totally lacking a sense of humor.
SighSorta compounds what I heard from my stepdad while heading to bed. He was on the phone with his daughter.
“Oh, I’m hanging in there. I keep having these stomach pains, but I prayed and they went away.”
Who needs ginseng when you’ve got a god in the mix?
there oughta be a law!!… against Assault with a Deadly Prayer. Congress should get right on it. But watch out: they may sneak in an amendment for a stimulus for the Gideon people.
There’s one reason for all this:God loves bears.
He’s clearly a big fan of beards and although his son was a scrappy little guy, there’s no doubt he had a beard.
So he says “hm, there are bears here at this event!” and saves Beard Central in New Orleans. And I doubt he’ll push SF into the sea until Lone Star and The Eagle shut down.
They get their wish.Inhofe IS dead–from the neck up, at least.
This incredibly bizarre incident says a lot about the country….
TrollTotal CSPAN Troll!
Says more about the worthlessness of prayer…No progress from wearing bear skins and clacking rocks together until today.
Most humans are intellectual savages.
“I don’t know what’s weirderabout 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”
I’d definitely vote for the former. It’s not unusual for C-SPAN hosts to keep a straight face: that network has been Ground Zero for jaw-dropping weirdities for a couple of decades now. And I’d assume a GOP Senator from Wyoming has heard this kind of thing before.
But I’m not 100% sure that wasn’t a prank call — would such a fanatical teabagger really refer to “our tea bag group”?