Tom Coburn: A Five Letter Word for The Sound A Duck Makes

Last we heard from Senator Coburn, he was spending the confirmation hearing for Chief Justice John Roberts attempting to complete a crossword puzzle (and apparently, not doing very well).

He’s back. This time its comforting to know that Coburn will be lending his medical skills to read the mind of Judge Sam Alito. Here’s the exchange from Meet the Press yesterday:

MR. RUSSERT: Do you believe as a physician you can tell whether a candidate for the Supreme Court is telling the truth?
SEN. COBURN: I think you can certainly tell when they're ill at ease with a subject and sometimes telling the truth or not. I think you can do that. I think you can do that--anybody can be trained to do that--by body language, respiratory avoidance responses. Yeah, I think you can.
MR. RUSSERT: And have you used those skills to make judgments like that?
SEN. COBURN: Mm-hm, I certainly have.
MR. RUSSERT: Has any--have you ever detected someone lying?
SEN. COBURN: Uh-huh, lots of times.
MR. RUSSERT: In your hearings.
SEN. COBURN: Sure.
MR. RUSSERT: Such as?
SEN. COBURN: Well , I'm not going to say that. You know, I'm--in lots of hearings that I've had on federal financial management where we're looking at the $100 billion that we found wasted far this year from 2004, I found lots of times when people were not truthful. Absolutely.
MR. RUSSERT: Based on your skills as a physician.
SEN. COBURN: Yeah. And then what you do is you go then look it up and see where the problem is and all of a sudden you find, wait, this isn't truthful.

If only he had used his special powers to tell us that Iraq really didn’t have WMD or that these guys were lying…