Tom Coburn, RIP
Like lots of fanatics, the former Republican senator from Oklahoma was at bottom a moralist.
Tom Coburn, the former Republican senator from Oklahoma, was a fanatic, and I mean that in the very best sense of the word. In 2003, when a reporter for his local newspaper said he wanted to write about the politician’s recent bout with cancer, Coburn scolded him: “You should be writing about Medicaid and Medicare instead of my health.”
Coburn finally succumbed to cancer last week; meanwhile, the object of his grandest obsession—the parlous financial condition of the federal government’s finances, including the funding of Medicaid and Medicare—survives him. Some of the send-offs in the press read more like character assassination than obituary. Fanatics are generally unloved and, for that reason, rare in mainstream
