Sen. Coburn’s comments on Congress and President Obama raise eyebrows

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) on Thursday called a remark he made earlier in the week about carrying a weapon on the Senate floor “a joke.”

“Political correctness is BS,” Coburn said, as reported by the News Times. “Tell ’em to get over it. It was a joke and everybody laughed. That’s all I have to say about it.”

{mosads}Earlier in the week at a town hall Coburn had criticized his congressional colleagues, calling them “cowards” and a “class of career elitists,” and suggested it was good that congressional rules forbade him from carrying a firearm on the Senate floor.

“It’s just a good thing I can’t pack a gun on the Senate floor,” Coburn told a crowd in Langley, Okla., as reported in Wednesday’s Tulsa World. 

That remark drew fire on Thursday from Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.), who called it “outrageous and unconscionable.”

In the same town hall on Wednesday, Coburn, responding to an attendee who asked whether Obama “wants to destroy America,” said that President Obama wants to “create dependency because it worked so well for him.”

Coburn said that Obama, as an African-American, gets a “tremendous advantage from a lot of these” government programs.

The remarks were surprising, given that Obama and Coburn, although far apart on the political spectrum, were known to be friends when Obama was a senator.

—This story was updated at 12:32 p.m.