Right-wing Political Meltdown: Tom Coburn's Very, Very, Very Bad Week

Oklahoma's outspoken conservative junior senator, Dr. Tom Coburn, is not having much fun this week.

This is the guy, after all, who said every day in the U.S. senate without Al Franken is a good day.

But this week the former comedian became Sen. Al Franken, the junior senator from Minnesota, effectively ending Coburn's happy reverie.

Even worse for Coburn, he and his pal, Sen. John Ensign, are making headlines, but not in a good way.

Turns out that Coburn and the sexually challenged Ensign have been housemates on C Street in Washington, which gets interesting because the C Street house was home to a group of Christian conservative legislators known as The Family, a group that once included another sexually challenged Republican lawmaker, Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina.

We have no idea what's been going at the C Street house, but the behavior of some of the residents is neither Christian nor conservative.

As we have noted in earlier reports, Dr. Coburn seems to be an honorable man, but his role in advising Ensign is interesting and worthy of further investigation. It doesn't help that Coburn has advanced a bogus claim of "privilege" in advising Ensign or his tendency, expressed today, in blaming the media for the sexual misconduct of his colleagues.

If he's really the honorable politician he presents himself to be, he's going to have to take actual responsibility, which means he's going to have to own up to his actions and stop blaming others.