Odd: Senate Won't Let Senator/Doctor Coburn Deliver Babies One Day A Week

Instapundit, I think, has a book or law review article about how often-nonsenical rules forbidding an appearance of improriety frequently (perhaps deliberately) permit or mask actual impropriety. By creating a set of clear-but-jackass rules about the former, true impropriety is permitted, by someone who just jumps through the right ethical-cannon hoops. Common sense is removed from the equation in favor of clarity, but a clarity largely divorced from reality.

Senate rules permit folks like Barbara Boxer to write (or should I say "write," as in "based on a dopey idea by Barbara Boxer, actually written by a romance-novel hack") and be paid by large media corporations -- players who obviously have a legislative interest in currying favor with Senators.

And yet only 51 Senators were willing to vote in favor of a sense-of-the-Senate resolution which stated that Tom Coburn's one-day-a-week obstetrician practice would not warrant an Ethics Committee investigation.

Several Republicans voted against this, claiming that if you're in the Senate, this is your job. Your only job. Citizen-legislators are, I guess, passe.

John Fund wants to know if it's more likely that Barbara Boxer will be influenced by a megamedia corporation publishing her daffy little political potboiler (a book, I feel confindent in saying, would not be published were she not a Senator) or if Tom Coburn will be corrupted by the relationship he has with a family whose child he's just delivered.

What favors, precisely, would they ask of him? Government subsidies on pacifiers and diapers? A Senate resolution declaring their kid "#1 Superbaby" or "World's Greatest Infant"?

And furthermore-- where is the risk of corruption in providing a service at proveable market rates?

There aren't any royalty payments for baby-deliveries, nor big marketing budgets to promote them. The very fact that a bad book, which would otherwise not be published, is published at all means that someone out there is getting payments they wouldn't otherwise have. And, while a big advance is often suspect, there are other, more subltle ways to corrupt a Senator/thriller-writer -- a big part of any publishing deal is the marketing budget. The more money in that budget, the more copies you'll sell, the more money you'll get.

It's a hidden form of payment to the "writer." It's not a direct payment, but it indirectly increases profits to the "writer."

If Barbara Boxer's marketing budget was anything north of two-buck fitty cent, they threw more money at her than her, ahem, literary talents would warrant. And that is a form of genuine corruption.

And yet the Senate frets that somehow Tom Coburn is going to be improperly influenced by delivering a baby. Despite the fact that the amount of money he makes for this endeavor only just covers his malpractice insurance.

Thanks to Deep Stoat, my super-secret government source, who sends me all sorts of obscure information that you can read yourself in the Wall Street Journal.

Update: Bad Sex From Barbara Boxer: Fund can't help but quote her hhhhhot sex scene:

"Greg's naked body was long and elegant, his embrace enveloped her utterly, and they meshed with ease and grace. He smelled good too, faintly and astringently of aftershave. He was clinging to her as if he'd never let her go, it was all so easy and right."

"He was clinging to her as if he'd never let her go, it was all so easy and right." Very original. I think this line has only been used in like seven hundred thousand boy-band love ballads.

Bonus sexiful points for using the turn-on word "astringently." Everyone gets a little charged up by erotic allusions to Blackbeard's Delight or Sex Panther.