I wish I’d saved the text of our chat, but here’s what was going on while we were making kitten noises and chimp jokes:
“To me, there has to be consequences to accepting responsibility. And I would just say, Mr. Attorney General, it’s my considered opinion that the exact same standards should be applied to you in how this was handled. And it was handled incompetently. The communication was atrocious. It was inconsistent. It’s generous to say that there were misstatements. That’s a generous statement. And I believe you ought to suffer the consequences that these others have suffered. And I believe that the best way to put this behind us is your resignation.” — Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla.
You know, if I sucked at my job as much as these guys suck at theirs, I’d be fired by now, and sometimes I think that’s what really pisses me off. That butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, National Guardsmen serving their second tour in Iraq, single moms working two jobs, they don’t get the breaks. They don’t get the license to just slack the hell off and make shit up to make their lives easier. Our government shouldn’t be something we look at with disgust. Our leaders should be better than that, and at some point, I don’t know which happened first, but two things happened: they stopped giving us what we deserved, and we stopped demanding it.
A.