Senatorial sassiness

Rhetorical silliness in Washington knows no bounds. Senate Democrats claimed Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Muskogee, had a death wish for 92-year-old Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia last weekend. Byrd is wheelchair bound, and Democrats scheduled a key health care vote at 1 a.m. Monday. Without Byrd, Democrats would be one vote short of moving the legislation along toward final passage.

From the Senate floor Sunday afternoon, Coburn suggested Americans pray that “somebody can’t make the vote tonight.” Democrats said it amounted to petitioning for Byrd’s demise. It’s absurd, of course. Washington had just been blanketed with a foot and a half to two feet of snow, making travel next to impossible. One snowbound Democrat and the tables would be turned. Maybe the Almighty was trying to tell Democrats something about their vote.

In any event, Democrats said Coburn’s remark crossed a line — a line Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank writes wasn’t so clear earlier when Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., compared Republicans to the Nazis on Kristallnacht, lynch mobs in the South and bloodthirsty crowds of the French Revolution. Now that’s some  industrial-strength rhetoric!