Gerson can't help himself

After blindsiding Senate conservatives in a recent screed for their unwillingness to blindly approve $50 billion in deficit spending for AIDS relief in Africa, Michael Gerson is now using the Bible to attack Tom Coburn. In this piece, Gerson picks out one sentence of a Coburn column and proceeds to completely misrepresent Coburn's argument. Coburn was not arguing that Jesus was a libertarian, rather, he was making a point about how so-called "compassionate" conservatives love to spend other people's money.

Read it for yourself:

Now comes another charge -- that compassionate conservatism is actually opposed by the Bible. "Common sense and the Scriptures," argues Sen. Tom Coburn, "show that true giving and compassion require sacrifice by the giver. This is why Jesus told the rich young ruler to sell his possessions, not his neighbor's possessions. Spending other people's money is not compassionate."

It is not my purpose to pick on the senator from Oklahoma (once again); he is a man of principle. And he is merely restating a fairly common view: that compassion is a private virtue, not a public one, and that religious conscience concerns the former and not the latter.

But this is a theological assertion, not a political one. And as theology, it is flawed.

Be sure to keep reading and note where Gerson concludes that Coburn would not like to associate himself with the great, and yes compassionate, works of William Wilberforce, John Wesley and Lord Shaftesbury. This is of course a laughable charge. Not only has Tom Coburn demonstrated compassion throughout his life (this is a guy after all who inists on continuing to deliver babies while he is a senator, and charges nothing for it), but he works for it in the Senate. MEMO TO GERSON: It is possible to pass compassionate legislation that does not fleece the taxpayer.

This is another example of raising prudential disagreements about social ills to the level of moral disputes. Gerson and company do this everytime, and it gets tiresome.